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Copyright N°. 



COPlfRIGHT DEPOSm 



Religion for the Time 



Six Conferences on Natural Reli- 
gion. Delivered in the Church 
of the Transfiguration, New York, 



BY 1/ 

The Rev. ARTHUR B. CONGER 



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Rector of the Memorial Church of the Good Shepherd, 

Rosemont, Pa. 



«< History teaches us that nothing is so natural as the super- 




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PHILADELPHIA 

GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO. 

103-105 SOUTH FIFTEENTH STREET 



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THE" USMAt^Y Ckf 
Two CowEfl RecEfVE* 

APR. 24 1902 

COI»vtvi»MT ENTRY I 

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Copyright, 1902, 
By Arthur B. Conger 
Published^ April, jgoz 



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(^ The object of these conferences is to give the people at 

^ large a simple statement of the main positions of Theism. 
The conception of them sprang out of the writer's expe- 
rience as a parish priest. It seemed that the assertions 
so confidently made, by men high in some departments 
of thought, to the effect that the disclosures, scientific, 
philosophical and critical, of the last half century ren- 
dered the fundamental truths of Christianity no longer 
tenable, had filtered down through books, magazines, 
newspapers and platform addresses to the masses of peo- 
ple. In their minds it lay in a very general form, it is 
true, but operative so far as this, that it loosened their 
hold on the faith and practice which formerly they had 
regarded as their anchor and legitimate sphere of duty. 
It was hoped that a statement of the truth, free from all 
technical language and all difficulties, except those in- 
herent in the thought itself, would appeal to a large num- 
ber of really earnest persons. And if the conferences 
should aid some of the clergy in their presentation of 
these great truths, which lie at the very basis of all re- 
ligion, the writer would have the highest ground for re- 
joicing. The scholar, and the man of culture will 

3 



4 Preface 

doubtless feel that too much has been sacrificed to sim- 
plicity and to the comprehension of the people at large. 
I trust that he will also feel that no important truth, rela- 
tive to the subject, has been obscured by the dress in 
which it appears. For the rest it is hoped that his sym- 
pathy with the aim of a priest will cause his judgment to 
be tempered with charity. 

The four essays appended indicate the lines on which 
the position taken in the final conference might be ex- 
tended to those strongholds which modern attack has 
made it so necessary to defend. 

The Author. 

Rosemontf Fa,, January, igo2. 



Contents 



Introductory Conference .... 7 
• Conference II. Agnosticism . . . -31 

Conference III. The Causal Judgment and 

Some of Its Consequences, 55 

Conference IV. Conscience and Will . . 85 

Conference V. Original Sin the Bridge by 

Which We Pass from Nat- 
ural TO Revealed Reli- 
gion . . . .121 

Conference VI. God's Method of Preserving 

His Revelation to all Ages . 151 

Essay I. The Anglican Church and Prot- 
estantism . . . -193 

Essay II. The Christian's Attitude to the 

Higher Criticism . . .215 

Essay III. The Nature of Inspiration as Ap- 
plied TO THE Holy Scripture 238 

Essay IV. Catholic Dogma and Modern Ex- 
egesis ..... 264 

5 



Introductory Conference 



*' Indeed it is a strange-disposed time : 
But men may construe things after their fashion, 
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves." i 

1 " Julius Caesar," Act I, Scene III. 

It is in these words, spoken by the greatest of our 
poets concerning an age long past but not, in many re- 
spects, dissimilar from our own, that I find the thought 
that I wish to sound the keynote of what I shall have to 
say to you in these conferences. We belong to a great 
age. It is not less certain that it has very marked char- 
acteristics. Within fifty years we have seen a develop- 
ment of science, and accompanying it, I know not 
whether to say as its comrade or its child, a vast material 
growth, in all departments, such as the world has never 
before witnessed . Such has been the fascination both of the 
principles themselves and the product which has flowed 
from them, that every realm of thought and every field 
of activity has felt their golden touch. All the condi- 
tions of living have been made immensely easier. In 
addition the opportunities of amassing wealth have al- 
most indefinitely increased. Now, we ought not to be 
surprised that in this feature of our time we discover a 

7 



8 Introductory 

force adverse to religion. It always has been. It is so 
pleasant to the human heart to live in luxury, to be 
agreeably, if not vulgarly, conspicuous at the resort, in 
the country, in the town that we should antecedently ex- 
pect that when the prize was placed within the grasp of 
many they would seize upon it with an avidity which 
would blind their minds to other things — perhaps, in 
many cases, to all things else. 

But this is not the only, perhaps not the most potent 
hostile force arrayed against us. We have that to deal 
with that which bears the proud name of philosophy. A 
whole system reaching out into all domains of thought 
and embracing as well the practical and economic 
sciences, which affirms, in polite phrases it is true, but 
none the less emphatically, that all consideration of the 
supernatural is at best a waste of time. Some writers tell 
us that most probably there is no such thing, and others 
that whether there is or not, it is impossible from the 
constitution of our minds to acquire any knowledge of 
it. This when fortified by the temptation to pass an 
easy, self-indulgent life becomes a very strong power 
indeed. Besides this there are a certain number of 
gentlemen in Germany who have demonstrated to their 
own satisfaction, and to that of a considerable following 
in England and this country that the Old Testament is 
largely made up of fables and fairy tales, was not writ- 
ten by its reputed authors, and was put forth with the 
estimable intention of inducing Israel, exilic and post- 
exilic, to perform duties to which they would doubtless 
have proved recreant had those duties been recom- 



Introductory 9 

mended by mere contemporary authorities. Some of 
them see ^ and some of them do not that this brings the 
New Testament with the Old tottering in a common 
downfall. There is then nothing left but the Church, 
and they have been disciplined by three centuries and a 
half of Protestantism to contemn the Church. All re- 
ligion, then, becomes a mere matter of individual opinion. 
But if a man, more than usually earnest, seek to attain 
the truth, he finds opinions so many and various, he 
discovers discrepancies so great that he feels that a life- 
time would be required to unravel the mazy skein and 
attain even an approach to satisfaction. Some would 
even endure this toil had they any guarantee of success. 
But in this nineteenth century Babel, all result, or any, 
is problematical. And so the gentleman spends his 
money on his living and his family, not the Church. He 
may be seen on the avenue and in the park on Sunday, 
not his pew. And he spends the afternoon playing golf, 
not in teaching a class in the Sunday-school. And the 
women give teas, and dances. I hope I do not appear 
to exaggerate the condition that confronts us. 

The next remark I wish to make is that I take a hope- 
ful view of the outlook. In the first place we should 
clearly recall that there is nothing really new in the 
situation. St. Chrysostum found it just as hard to con- 
vert the worldly court of Eudoxia as the clergy of this 
city do the residents of its crowded streets. France in 
the time of Louis XIV, England during the reign of Charles 
II or even a century ago does not appear to have been a 

^ Goldwin Smith, " Guesses Riddle of Existence," pp. 75 and 76. 



lo Introductory- 

bit more pious and perhaps not nearly so moral as this 
country and time. The fact is that every extended period 
of ecclesiastical history warns us that anything approach- 
ing the devotion of a people is quickly replaced by some- 
thing very like its apostasy. Do you ask me why ? At 
least for two reasons. *^Man is far gone from original 
righteousness.'* And then I suppose God would test 
of what calibre His servants are in giving them an op- 
portunity to meet and repel the attack. 

Do you ask me then if I really anticipate that the 
Church will be able to confront and roll back the tide of 
godlessness that has risen in our day ? I reply undoubt- 
edly.^ I expect another wave of faith, such as the Oxford 
movement which sent its bright and healing waters to 
perhaps every shore of earth, before many years are over. 
Do you ask my reasons? They are two. Our Lord 
said, *' I am with you all days to the end of the world *' ; 
and I have that firm faith that the image of God, though 
marred, is the very essence of our inner life, which you 
remember Tertullian expressed with characteristic fervor, 
when, having summed up the evidence, he burst forth — 
*' O testimony of a soul by nature Christian.'* ^ That is 
to say I firmly believe that there is that in the souls of 
men — I do not deny that there may be exceptions — 
which when appealed to calmly, lovingly and with in- 
telligence gives for response — *^ Like as the hart de- 

^ Professor James after reading " Balfour's Foundations of 
Belief," is said to have remarked to a friend — " It seems as if 
Christianity was going to have another inning." 

2Apol. I. 17. 



Introductory 1 1 

sireth the water-brook, so longeth my soul after Thee, O 
God. My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the 
living God. When shall I come to appear before the 
presence of God ? ** ^ And may I answer one more ques- 
tion ? How shall we obtain the response of that peren- 
nial witness to the presence of God in man ? The reply 
is by interrogating his fundamental intuitions. But you 
say this is metaphysics. Certainly it is. When a man 
rejects supernatural religion you have no resource with 
him but natural, and this is the sphere of metaphysics. 

Let us be on our guard against being prejudiced by a 
name. I remember Dr. McCosh in one of his lectures 
remarking that the young lady yawning over a novel ex- 
claims — "metaphysics is always associated in my mind 
with a headache.*' *'But," was the Doctor's comment, 
*'how could she have known that ideas were associated 
unless the metaphysicians had told her so?" Now I 
hope you will believe me that not only are we all under 
great obligations to metaphysics, but also in so far as we 
possess the power of thinking deeply are metaphysicians ; 
for metaphysics is nothing in the world except clear and 
accurate thought applied to the profound and underlying 
truths of our own and all other being. You will recall 
the fact that Socrates declared that a child had in his 
mind the rudiments of all philosophy, and upon being 
challenged to prove it placed a boy in the midst of those 
who doubted and elicited from him a statement of funda- 
mental truth. He found it necessary merely to phrase 
his questions in language which was level with the 

1 Ps. 42 : 1-3. 



1 2 Introductory 

child's comprehension. And I trust that you will ac- 
knowledge, before these conferences are over, that you 
have been metaphysicians all your lives, perhaps in some 
cases without being conscious that you were entitled to 
that proud appellation. 

The next thing of which I wish to remind you is that 
the ultimate declaration of the human mind is the final 
test of truth. You will see at once that there can be no 
other. There may be people who consider it senseless to 
ask the question — *< What is truth ? '* But supposing a 
man does ask it I submit to you that the only answer 
possible is — that which I trow. It is the response which 
my mind makes after looking over the entire field and 
obtaining such information and aid as I can command. 
That is truth for me. And absolute truth is that in 
which the consentient voice of mankind unites to declare 
its convictions. Unfortunately on some of the subjects 
which we shall be obliged to consider there seems since 
the rise of reflective thought, six hundred years before 
our era, to have been two types of mind. If therefore I 
shall be able to demonstrate that, on the whole, the 
strength of the argument preponderates in favor of Theism ; 
and particularly that all along the line, that is, that in 
every, or at least in most of its aspects one must take an 
inferior stand in order to reject the doctrine of God as 
the Author and Moral Governor of the universe, I shall 
feel that I have attained the purpose of these conferences. 
My own judgment is much stronger. I believe that the 
utterance of reason when finally adjusted is coercive and 
that the individual who rejects it does thereby pronounce 



Introductory 13 

himself an anomaly. But we all have somewhat of the 
experience of Macbeth, the meaning of whose words we 
do but amplify in applying them to our entire subject. 

** Can such things be, 
And overcome us like a summer's cloud, 
Without our special wonder ? You make me strange 
Even to the disposition that I owe, 
When now I think, you can behold such sights, 
And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks. 
When mine are blanched with fear." ^ 

It seems to be clear that even our moral nature may be 
ignored and therefore I lay aside the more ambitious 
project of a demonstration and content myself with the 
more humble one of showing that Theism in the present 
state of human thought, as it always has been, furnishes 
us with a more satisfactory solution of the problems of 
the world and life than any other system. It will be a 
difficulty to some that the evidence cannot be presented 
in such a form as to override all opposition, and compel 
the assent of even the most vigorous opponent. But you 
will recall a very old and a very true proverb. '* A man 
convinced against his will remains of the same opinion 
still.'* And the explanation is that the mind is a unit. 
We do not arrive at conclusions with any one, or any 
one set of our faculties ; but by the concurrent action of 
them all — intellect, affection and will. And one of the 
points which I hope will greatly strengthen our position 
is that the will is as important a factor in conviction as 
either affection or intellect. 

1 Act III, Scene IV. 



14 Introductory 

When the elder Pitt read Butler's Analogy his criticism 
was that the bishop raised as many questions as he 
solved. Cousin regarded Pascal as a philosophic skep- 
tic, and you know that there is a whole class of men who 
see in Cardinal Newman a sower of the seeds of doubt. 
It is true that Newman does say, '* If logic says other- 
wise, so much the worse for logic ; " ^ and Pascal affirms 

*^The heart has its reasons, which the reason knows 
nothing about. ... .It is the heart that feels God 
and not the reason. This is faith : God sensible to the 
heart, not to the reason.*' ^ But what is their meaning? 
It is so clear that it is hard to see how any one ever mis- 
took it. By heart Pascal intends to designate the in- 
tuitional element in the mind, and by reason its discursive 
processes ; and Newman means that if logic wanders out 
of its sphere and announces conclusions that are obviously 
at variance with the fundamental declarations of the 
mind, we have in this very fact the proof that a task has 
been given ratiocination which should have been allotted 
to another faculty ; and we should expect as manifest a 
botch as we would if we employed a blacksmith to repair 
our watch. You see then that the whole question is one 
of nomenclature. And to avoid misunderstanding as far 
as possible I shall use the word reason according to the 
famous definition of Coleridge. ** Reason is the power 
of universal and necessary convictions, the source and 
substance of truths above sense and having their evidence 
in themselves." I am, of course, not insensible to the 

^ Gram. Ass. 

2 Thoughts Trans., O. W. Wright, 236. 



Introductory l^ 

objections to this definition and only adopt it for purposes 
of clearness and convenience. When I wish to indicate 
a logical process I shall employ the participle reasoning. 

I shall not expect in the brief space allotted to these 
conferences to give anything like an exhaustive exhibition 
of the intuitions, but shall treat only the principal of 
those upon which repose the structure of natural religion. 
We shall see the grounds for maintaining our belief in 
the reality and indestructibility of the soul as against 
agnostics and pessimists. We shall see that the state- 
ment that every new thing, that every change must have 
a cause is demanded by reason, and so that the rational 
belief is in a God the cause of all, and that if we discern 
a certain thing to be right we also feel an obligation to 
perform it. 

You will see at once that each one of these truths is 
self-evident. It is seen in its own light, like the axiom a 
straight line is the shortest distance between two points. 
If you try to doubt your own existence you will find that 
you have undertaken an impossible task ; for there you 
are at the very moment when you are endeavoring to im- 
agine that you have no being. Properly speaking, these 
great fundamental truths are not susceptible of proof, and 
that from the very nature of the case ; for proof involves 
some fact or truth more simple and better known than 
that which we are endeavoring to elucidate. But the in- 
tuitions are the simplest and best known of all truths. 
They are fundamental and for this reason lie at the basis 
of all knowledge. There is no lower stratum on which 
we may place ourselves, as a point of vantage as it were, 



i6 Introductory 

from which to observe them. The moment the mind is 
awakened into activity, either by an impression from 
without or by thought within, these intuitional judgments 
assert themselves as the condition of its further action. 
It would be just as easy to walk without feet as to think 
without these primary utterances of the mind. And so 
to the criterion of self-evidence of which we have now 
thought must be added those of necessity and universality. 
And it is in these that I find confidence in speaking to 
you. If I had chosen for my subject some topic which 
was a matter of mere opinion I might or might not have 
made myself intelligible, I might have won your assent 
but more probably would have failed. But when I say to 
you that you ought to do the right and shun the wrong ; 
that if you observe a change either in the world around 
you or in your own being it has been brought about by 
the action of some force equal to its production, I use 
language which no sane man has ever denied. I am 
moving in a sphere where all our humanity is at home, 
where every individual of our race — unless he be abnor- 
mal — is at one. And then if on the basis of your own 
nature I endeavor to assist you to see that properly re- 
garded it summons you to mount up round by round 
the ladder which leads to God, I have, I conceive, done that 
which relieves a deep felt want. For in times of doubt 
and perplexity, of suffering and trial, which come to 
most, perhaps to all, at some period of life it is probable 
that almost every one is thrown back upon these funda- 
mental truths ; and if the man cannot give a reason to 
himself for the hope in him which is grounded here his 



Introductory 1 7 

faith will leave him to be tossed hither and yon upon the 
billows of misbelief and disbelief and finally wrecked 
upon the pitiless rock of despair. 

I confess that I am seeking an excuse to quote 
Professor Max Miiller, both as showing you that my 
enthusiasm for natural religion is shared by great 
minds and also by those who part company with 
me when, as I hope to show you, I rise upon it, as 
Elijah did on the chariot of fire, to God and heaven 
— the full Revelation of Jesus Christ and all that it 
implies. 

"The whole world,*' says this superb writer, "in its 
wonderful history has passed through that struggle for 
life, the struggle for eternal life ; and every one of us in 
his own not less wonderful history, has had to pass 
through the same struggle ; for, without it, no religion, 
whatever its sacred books may be, will find in any human 
heart that soil in which alone it can strike root and on 
which alone it can grow and bear fruit. 

"We must all have our bookless religion, if the Sacred 
Books . . . are to find a safe and solid foundation 
within ourselves. . . .*' 

It is easy to say it before an audience like this, but I 
should not be afraid to say it before an audience of 
Brahmans, Buddhists, Parsis and Jews, that there is no 
religion in the whole world which in simplicity, in purity 
of purpose, in charity and true humanity, comes near to 
that religion which Christ taught to His disciples. And 
yet that very religion we are told is being attacked on all 
sides. "The unbelief of the day,*' as one of the most 



i8 Introductory 

eloquent bishops said at the late Church Congress, ''is 
not only aggressive but is almost omnipresent. It is found 
in the club and in the drawing-room. It is chattered to 
one by the first young gentleman who might be airing 
his free-thought, before he had learned how to talk. It 
is lisped prettily sometimes from charming lips at dinner- 
tables, and it lurks in the folds of the newspaper and the 
pages of the magazine and the novel.'* 

There may be other reasons for this omnipresent unbe- 
lief, but the principal reason is, I believe, the neglect of 
our foundations, the disregard of our own bookless re- 
ligion, the almost disdain of natural religion. . . . 

The heart and soul and mind of man are the same 
under every sky, in all the varying circumstances of 
human life; and it would indeed be awful to believe 
that any human beings should have been deprived of 
that light '^ which lighteth every man that cometh into 
the world/' It is that light which lighteth ^z;<?rv man, 
and which has lighted all the religions of the world, call 
them bookless or literate, human or divine, natural or 
supernatural, which alone can dispel the darkness of 
doubt and fear that has come over the world. What our 
age wants more than anything else is Natural Religion, 
Whatever meaning different theologians may attach to 
Supernatural Religion, history teaches us that nothing 
is so natural as the supernatural. But the supernatural 
must always be super-imposed on the natural. Super- 
natural religion without natural religion is a house built 
on sand, and when, as in our days, the rain of doubt de- 
scends and the floods of criticism come, and the winds of 



Introductory 19 

unbelief and despair blow, and beat upon that house, that 
house will fall, because it was not founded on the rock of 
bookless religion, of natural religion, of eternal religion. ^ 
It will perhaps be better at this point, than later, to 
answer a question that doubtless has already arisen in 
many minds. You will feel that if the argument for 
Theism is in fact so clear as I seem to represent, how is 
it that so many great and gifted minds have failed to 
grasp it? Why is it that Huxley and Tyndall and a 
whole galaxy of the leaders of the thought of our time, 
not only did not accept it, but all their lives wrote, some 
of them furiously, against it ? I answer first that these 
men were for the most part scientists. Now science has 
its appropriate sphere. It is the realm of phenomena. 
And the instrument of science is the senses making their 
report to the mind. When, for example, Laplace was 
asked why in all his works God was not even mentioned, 
he replied, ^* I have no need of that hypothesis," and he 
was as a scientist altogether entitled to that position. Of 
course you see the reason. His particular work required 
him to observe the facts obtainable, to register and collate 
them and to draw such conclusions as they warranted. 
With everything back of such phenomena and beyond 
them as he could persuade nature to yield up he had 
nothing to do. What was the cause of the fiery cloud, 
rotating with immense velocity and already under the 
spell of gravitation, or whether it had any cause, lay 
outside of his province. But you will readily see that 

i"Nat. Rel.,»' 569-72. 



20 Introductory 

exclusive application to one set of facts and the limita- 
tion of his experience to the machinery of a single method 
would have the tendency to warp his judgment in other 
directions and narrow his view. I adduce Mr. TyndalFs 
address on '^ The Scientific Use of the Imagination *' in 
illustration. In this really remarkable paper he shows 
us how a truly great scientist must proceed if he is to 
make signal discoveries and achieve conspicuous triumphs 
for the benefit of his fellow-man. He must not be tied 
down to the mere apprehensions of his senses, not even 
when aided by the most powerful and effective instru- 
ments modern ingenuity has devised. But the mind has 
a faculty, which Mr. Tyndall terras imagination, by 
which, when all these props and crutches of investigation 
fail, of its own right and inherent power goes out into 
regions yet untraversed and reports what it has pictured 
and seen. His illustration is the blue of the firmament. 
He tells us that the ether, which separates us from the 
stars and sun, must be filled with particles of matter to 
enable it to transmit the light to us. After certain ex- 
periments he is convinced that these minute particles are 
the cause of the blue of the heavens. He now enquires 
how much ordinary dust distributed through space it 
would take to produce this result. He tells us that we 
have phenomena which assure us of particles of matter 
smaller than one one-hundred-thousandth part of an 
inch. The most powerful microscope has reached its 
limit long before molecules of such minuteness are con- 
templated. Imagination is the only faculty we have to 
deal with them. He enters for it a plea of the widest 



Introductory 21 

liberty and exercise. And then makes this most inter- 
esting statement, ''Let a shell be placed at a height 
above the earth equal to the Matterhorn or Mount Blanc, 
so as to exclude the grosser matter in the atmosphere 
nearer the earth. Let the atmospheric space beyond 
the shell be swept clean, and let the sky-matter be prop- 
erly gathered up. What is the probable amount ? I have 
sometimes thought that a lady's portmanteau would 
contain it all. I have even thought that a gentleman's 
portmanteau — possibly his snuff-box — might take it in. 
And whether the actual sky be capable of this amount 
of condensation or not, I entertain no doubt that a sky 
quite as vast as ours and as good in appearance could 
be formed from a quantity of matter which might be 
held in the hollow of the hand.'* ^ 

Whether this statement and reasoning are true or not I 
do not consider myself competent to judge. But this I 
do know, that every great advance in knowledge, whether 
of pure or applied thought, has been attained in some 
such way as this. A great genius in the untrammeled 
exercise of his giant faculties has had a vision of ex- 
quisite truth unknown before. He has worked and 
worked until he has been able to establish a connection 
between the beauteous view held up to him and some 
already ascertained truth. When he has succeeded in 
this he has strung it on — a new jewel added to the pearls 
of knowledge. It is well known that it was thus that 
the falling apple led Newton to the greatest discovery of 
science in all the ages. Millions had seen the same 

1 " Use and Limit of Imagination in Science," p. 36. 



22 Introductory 

time after time. But the great discoverer of the law of 
gravitation alone had the impulse to look aloft and con- 
nect this apparently trifling fact with the movement of 
the spheres in their orbits. 

Now when a man has the sublimity of mind — for I can 
call it no less — to present us with so magnificent a con- 
ception as I have just rehearsed to you in Mr. Tyndall's 
words, we cannot but confess to a feeling of disappoint- 
ment when he proceeds to tell us that without a platform 
of matter to act as a point, as it were, of departure, the 
wings of imagination are powerless, or at least bring back 
no reliable message from their flight. This is what he 
says : 

" Given the nature of a disturbance in water, air or 
ether — from the physical qualities of the medium we can 
infer how its particles will be aff'ected. Here the mind 
runs with certainty along the line of thought which con- 
nects the phenomena, and from beginning to end finds no 
break in the chain. But when we endeavor to pass by a 
similar process from the phenomena of physics to those 
of thought, we meet a problem which transcends any con- 
ceivable expansion of the powers which we now possess. 
We may think over the subject again and again, but it 
eludes all intellectual presentation. We stand face to face 
with the incomprehensible. The territory of physics is 
wide, but it has its limits from which we look with vacant 
gaze into the region beyond. Whence come we ; whither 
go we ? The question dies without an answer — without 
even an echo — upon the infinite shores of the unknown. 
Let us follow matter to its utmost bounds ; let us claim 



Introductory 23 

it in all its forms to experiment with and to speculate 
upon. Casting the term ^ vital force * from our vocab- 
ulary, let us reduce, if we can, the visible phenomena of 
life to mechanical attractions and repulsions. Having 
thus exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, the 
real mystery still looms beyond us. We have in fact 
made no step towards its solution. And thus it will 
ever loom — ever beyond the bounds of knowledge — 
compelling the philosophies of successive ages to confess 
that 

« We are such stuff 
As dreams are made of, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep." ^ 

Is it not wonderful? If it is a little dust that Mr. 
Tyndall has to deal with he can believe, and ask us to 
believe, in particles so small that he has never seen them 
and knows that no man by the aid of the most delicate 
instrument can ever hope to see them ; moreover that 
they possess molecular potencies so magnificent as to 
enable an handful of them at once to create the exquisite 
azure of the sky and to bring light to us from those 
splendid orbs myriads of miles away. But without this 
basis of earth, this sensory foundation, we cannot trust 
the most irresistible and persistent declarations of the 
mind. Surely there can be but one explanation and 
that is that the man has looked without himself so long, 
that he has forgotten that it is he himself who looks, or 
that, from the necessity of the case, he must look from 

*" Physics and Metaph.," Saturday Review^ Aug. 4, i860. 



24 Introductory 

within, and that everything from without must first pass 
within before it can be adjudicated upon or receive the 
seal of truth. 

If, as we have seen, the first answer to the question 
why does not the theistic argument appeal to many great 
minds is that they were constrained in the bondage of 
science, the second answer is that they were not meta- 
physicians. Mr. Goldwin Smith says that Huxley is the 
most courageous and candid thinker of recent times. I 
now believe that he is one of them. But when I first 
read his rejoinder to Dr. Wace's paper in the now famous 
Agnosticism controversy, I thought him one of the most 
disingenuous writers I had ever perused. He seemed all 
through to be hedging and trying to throw dust in the 
eyes of his opponent and readers. My conversion was due 
to the perception at last that he really did not know what 
he was talking about. Now I speak of this to introduce 
my conviction that most of the apparent difficulties which 
arise among men of sincere purpose and clear thought 
result from this one or that going out of his sphere. 
The field of knowledge is now so vast that no man can 
hope to occupy more than a small corner in it, and the 
fact that a man is an expert in one department furnishes no 
presumption whatever that he will not appear as the veriest 
tyro if he attempts to speak in another. All domains of 
knowledge demand special characteristics and are eluci- 
dated by special tests. The mind of an individual ac- 
commodates itself in time to the peculiar requirements 
of the branch which he has made his life-work. He 
thus acquires a special fitness to proceed in that depart- 



Introductory 25 

ment to regions where no other has ever penetrated. 
Vista after vista opens on his view and he perceives 
beauties wholly invisible to a less trained and loving eye. 
But for all this he must pay the cost. And the cost is 
the limitation of his powers of vision in other directions. 
The experience of Charles Darwin stated by himself 
seems to me both pathetic and convincing. 

*' Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many 
kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Words- 
worth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure ; 
I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the 
historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures 
gave me considerable, and music very great delight. 
But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line 
of poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and 
found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. Music 
generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I 
have been at work on instead of giving me pleasure. I 
retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause 
me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. . . . 
This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic 
tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, 
and travels (independently of any scientific facts which 
they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects, 
interest me as much as they ever did. My mind seems 
to have become a kind of machine for grinding general 
laws out of large collections of facts; but why this 
should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain 
alone, on Avhich the higher tastes depend, I cannot con- 
ceive. A man with a mind more highly organized or 



26 Introductory 

better constituted than mine would not, I suppose, have 
thus suffered : and if I had to Hve my life again, I would 
have made a rule to read some poetry and to listen to 
some music at least once every week ; for perhaps the 
parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been 
kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a 
loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the 
intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by 
enfeebling the emotional part of our nature." ^ 

That a mind like Darwin's should have lost the use of 
a whole set of faculties, once active, prepares us to be- 
lieve that the powers which grasp religion may be forced 
into inactivity by the continual exertion of a different set, 
or finally destroyed. Of this we have in very recent 
times an illustration so marked that it seems as if it 
should be adduced. George Romanes was a Cambridge 
scholar whose abilities were recognized as belonging to 
the first class. In 1874 he gained the Burney prize for 
an essay on Prayer. His position here is eminently 
Christian. His studies now became, and for a consider- 
able period remained, almost exclusively devoted to 
physical science. He entirely lost his faith and wrote an 
essay explaining his position, which he entitled the 
Candid Examination. He died in 1894 in the com- 
munion of the Church. In some notes that were pub- 
lished after his death he himself gives us an account of 
these seemingly strange transitions. He says, **In my 
youth I published an essay (the Candid Exami- 

* " The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin,'* Vol. I., p. 100. 



Introductory 27 

nation). ... In that treatise I have since come to 
see that I was wrong touching what I constituted the basal 
argument for my negative conclusion. Therefore I now 
feel it obligatory on me to publish the following results 
of my maturer thought from the same standpoint of pure 
reason. Even though I have obtained no further light 
from the side of intuition, I have from that of intellect. " ^ 
He tells us that the final change was not ''due so much 
to purely logical processes of the intellect as to the sub- 
conscious (and therefore more or less unanalysable) in- 
fluences due to the ripening experiences of life." * And 
this is the broad ground to which he was led. 
''Reason*' — it ought to be said that he uses this term 
to describe the processes and deductions of pure science 
— " Reason is not the only attribute of man, nor is it the 
only faculty which he habitually employs for the ascer- 
tainment of truth. Moral and spiritual faculties are of no 
less importance in their respective spheres even of every- 
day life ; faith, trust, taste, etc. , are as needful in ascer- 
taining truth as to character, beauty, etc., as is reason." * 
"Perhaps the hardest of these sacrifices " — those which 
Christianity entails—" to an intelligent man is that to his 
own intellect. At least I am certain that this is so in my 
own case. I have been so long accustomed to constitute 
my reason my sole judge of truth, that even while reason 
itself tells me that it is not unreasonable to expect that 
the heart and the will should be required to join with 

1 " Thoughts on Religion," p. 117. 

« Ibid., p. 106. 3 Ibid., p. 1 18. 



28 Introductory 

reason in seeking God (for religion is for the whole man) 
I am too jealous of my reason to exercise my will in the 
direction of my most heartfelt desires. For assuredly the 
strongest desire of my nature is to find that that nature 
is not deceived in its highest aspirations/' ^ 

I have quoted so much at length because it seemed that 
in no other way could I make the truth so clear. Here 
is a mind acknowledged to be of the first order, which 
suffered a temporary eclipse of faith, and lived to see the 
full splendor of its noonday sun beam in once more upon 
his soul. He tells us that the period of darkness he 
endured was the result of a bias produced in his mind by 
the exclusive devotion of one set Of his faculties to a 
single domain of phenomena and of facts. When later 
in life the whole of his nature asserted itself and obtained 
its normal and proportionate development faith returned. 
May it not be so with many others ? And would it not 
be a grand thing to aid them in ever so small a degree 
to the resuscitation of dormant powers, and to those faiths 
and hopes in which most are agreed that life finds its 
principal beauty and charm ? 

It is in the spirit and acting under the advice of one 
who has done much in this especial sphere that we desire 
to pursue our task. * ' When we wish to reprove with 
profit, and show another that he is mistaken, we must 
observe on what side he looks at the thing, for it is 
usually true on that side, and to admit to him that truth, 
but to discern to him the side whereon it is false. He is 

1 " Thoughts on Religion," p. 141. 



Introductory 29 

pleased with this, for he perceives that he was not mis- 
taken^ but that he only failed to look on all sides. Now 
one is not vexed at not seeing everything. But one does 
not like to be mistaken ; and perhaps this arises from the 
fact that man naturally cannot see everything and that 
naturally he cannot be deceived in regard to the side he 
looks at.'* ^ 



^ Pascal, « Thoughts," p. 221, 




II 



AGNOSTICISM 



^f^^'mmmmmmmmmi . ■ , i a LJ i mjj w i] ! 



CONFERENCE II 

AGNOSTICISM 

Under the term Agnosticism I intend to include all 
those systems of thought which limit the term knowledge 
to the apprehensions of the senses. This embraces, of 
course, a very wide sphere. Within its ample ranges the 
mere sensualist saunters gaily in the pursuit of pleasure, 
the philosophical materialist discourses in pleasing and, 
often, instructive tones, and the profound and earnest 
man of science devotes himself to the service of her 
whom Mr. Tyndall has, with at least a good deal of truth, 
described as the most jealous and exacting of mistresses. 

You will ask me why endeavor to survey so large a 
field in the short time allotted to a single conference. I 
reply that the fault is yours. I am warned that I 
cannot hope to obtain your attention for more than these 
six evenings, and it is hinted that I shall be fortunate if 
you do not tire of me before they are over. I must, 
therefore, make the best of my opportunity, and like a 
philosopher — though I cannot aspire to be thought one 
— find an advantage in my limitation. In the condensa- 
tion which I shall be compelled to exercise we shall get a 
gUmpse — a sort of bird's-eye view — of the whole subject 
which I trust will be followed by wider and more accu- 
rate investigations which my inadequacy and mistakes 
will compel you to make. 

33 



34 Religion for the Time 

I think I can hardly be wrong when I say that Agnos- 
ticism is the condition of mind that the great majority 
of men who have felt themselves obliged to abandon the 
practice of Christianity would be likely to ascribe to 
themselves. I see very little active or positive antago- 
nism to God. Men say we are in doubt. We do not 
know. The truth may be as the Church has always 
taught ; but you cannot expect us to make the sacrifices 
which it involves on an uncertainty. We must be con- 
vinced before we can persuade ourselves to lose our lives. 
Many of the leading thinkers of our time assure us that, 
not only is there nothing known of spiritual truth, but 
that the mind of man is so fashioned that nothing in that 
domain can be known. It is beyond the reach of any 
faculties we possess. 

Of course we will all admit that if this is the case of 
humanity in the world it is most unfortunate. It will be 
granted, I think, by all fair-minded people, that the 
affairs of the soul touch us even more keenly than do 
those of the body. If then we cannot know what the 
purpose of our life here is, or whether it has any purpose, 
if right and wrong are meaningless words, if duty is a 
mirage and love a delusion, if we have no ground for 
belief in an immortality in a life to come or even that 
we have a soul in this life — it would seem that two things 
follow. First, that our intellect with all its magnificent 
endowments is a very poor thing ; because it fails us at 
the exact point where we most crave knowledge and where 
it is really most necessary ; and secondly, that the agnos- 
tic position is not a desirable one. Carlyle once wrote, 



Agnosticism 35" 

*^ The end of the understanding is not to explain and give 
reasons, but to know and believe.'* ^ This ultimate func- 
tion then of the human mind is vitiated by Agnosticism in 
those departments where it is most important that it should 
be productive. Of this none have been more conscious 
than its leading lights. Professor Clifford who has given 
utterance to some of the most bitter things against Chris- 
tianity which have come to our knowledge once said, 
'* We have seen the spring sun shine out of an empty 
heaven upon a soulless earth, and we have felt with utter 
loneliness that the Great Companion was dead." Vis- 
count Amberly again, after having endeavored to prove 
that the Supreme Being is absolutely inscrutable and un- 
knowable, and that, therefore, all the old hopes and ideas 
of religion must be given up, says: ^'I can attempt no 
answer to the objection which will, no doubt, be urged, 
that so abstract and cold a faith as that expounded here 
can afford no satisfaction to the moral sentiments. In- 
deed I must to a certain extent admit the reality of the 
loss which the adoption of this faith entails. There is 
consolation, no doubt, in the thought of a heavenly 
Father who loves us ; there is strength in the idea that 
He sees and helps us, in our continual combat against 
evil ; there is happiness in the hope that He will assign 
us in another life an infinite reward for all the endurances 
of this. Above all, there is comfort in the reflection 
that when we are parted at death we are not parted for- 
ever ; that our love for those whom we have cherished on 
earth is no temporary bond, to be broken ere long in 

1 Essay on Biography. 



36 Religion for the Time 

bitterness and despair, but a possession never to be lost 
again — a union of souls, interrupted a little while by the 
separation of the body, only to be again renewed in far 
greater perfection, and carried on into far higher joys 
than can be even imagined here. All this is beautiful 
and full of fascination — why should we deny it? Can- 
dor compels us to admit that in giving it up, with the 
other illusions of our younger days, we are resigning a 
balm for the wounded spirit, for which it would be hard 
to find an equivalent in all the repertories of science and 
in all the treasures of philosophy.'* ^ Similar sentiments 
could be quoted almost indefinitely from the pages of 
eminent agnostics. We may therefore infer that noth- 
ing short of an absolute intellectual necessity should in- 
duce us to adopt their tenets. Is it, think you, this irre- 
sistible mental persuasion that has led men in such num- 
bers to adopt the system ; or was it in many cases per- 
haps an easy way of sheltering oneself under the mantle 
of great names from the consideration of difficult and 
perhaps not pleasant truths and in what seemed to be 
the pleasure of a life which was very attractive ? And 
was the sting of Bishop Magee's phrase '^cowardly 
agnosticism,*' =* not merely that he '^ departed from his 
customary courtesy and self-respect'* as Huxley thought, 
but that he touched upon a truth of wide-reaching sig- 
nificance ? 
The following conversation is said to have taken place 

»" Belief in God," Momerie, pp. 11, 12. 
2 " Christianity and Agnosticism," p. 15. 






Agnosticism 37 

between two society ladies. '^ Mrs. HighroUer, I am 
told, is about to organize a class for the study of Omar 
Khayyam/* <* Indeed I Do you know Omar Khay- 
yam?" *'No, I do not; but I do know that if Mrs. 
HighroUer has taken him up he's all right.*' We are 
too busy making money, or spending it to read or even 
to think. And so our attitude to almost every subject 
is determined by the single question — has it vogue ? A 
friend of mine, not a religious man, in a confidential 
talk said — '* There are a hundred men at the club who 
spend most of their time there in infidel talk; but I 
know perfectly well that not more than three or four have 
read or really know anything about the subject." It 
must have been with some such condition of affairs in 
mind that somebody defined an agnostic as ** a gentle- 
man who tells you he knows nothing and then gets fear- 
fully mad if you believe him." 

It seems, then, that it is not at all difficult to account 
for the wide spread of Agnosticism without ascribing pro- 
found knowledge or research to the great majority. But 
there is a very considerable minority who do think and 
study and who are unsurpassed in learning and brilliancy. 
Their watchword is experience. The instrument with 
which they would gather the materials of knowledge is 
sensation. What we see and hear and feel, what we can 
subject to an empirical test, that we may be said to 
know ; but they resolutely decline to recognize anything 
as meriting a place in the sphere of cognition which 
cannot make good its title at the bar of the senses. I, 
perhaps, ought to say that the sense in which the word 



38 Religion for the Time 

experience is employed is very wide, and includes all 
that has been inherited as well as acquired, together with 
all legitimate deductions from both these sources. It 
seems to be important, therefore, at this point to assure 
ourselves of the grounds of certitude on which the testi- 
mony of the senses rest. We will take as an illustration 
the sense of sight. / 

It used to be thought and I suppose people in general 
still think that we see with our eyes. But since the days 
of Berkeley those who have investigated the subject know 
better. The fact is that the only function which the eye 
performs in vision is to produce an image on the retina, 
and that is upside-down. But the impression registered 
here is communicated to an exceedingly delicate and 
complicated nervous apparatus and so transmitted to the 
interior of the brain. Here it is handed over to still an- 
other set of nerves and passed on to the angular gyrus. 
It is thus seen that it is in the innermost recesses of the 
brain that the external object photographed by the eye is, 
by a mental act, perceived. In other w^ords it is the mind 
that sees. Vision is an intellectual function. Something 
similar to this takes place in the perceptions we acquire 
through every sense. Now the point I desire to make 
very clear in the light of what we have just seen is this : 
the materialist would seem to cut the ground from under 
himself when he seeks to discredit the apprehensions of 
the mind in his effort to exalt those of the senses. For in 
every case the mind is the percipient. If, therefore, the 
mind in its direct and immediate declarations is untrust- 
worthy, then, a fortiori, is it unreliable when it speaks to 



Agnosticism 39 

us through a complicated sensory process. If without 
any medium we cannot believe its utterances, much less 
can we when it speaks to us through a nervous organism 
which, if it does anything, introduces an element of un- 
certainty. If you were unable to place confidence in 
what a man told you in his office you probably would 
not obtain conviction by calling him up and hearing his 
statement over the telephone. 

Comte and the Positivists, who were thoroughgoing 
Materiahsts, did not attempt to meet this question. They 
passed it over with supercilious contempt. They ridi- 
culed metaphysics as the pastime of children and fools. 
I would just say in passing that they found it necessary, 
nevertheless, to take more than one metaphysical position 
in order to maintain their own position. Mr. John 
Stuart Mill, who w^as a metaphysician, leaves the ques- 
tion whether or not the judgments of the mind proper 
have objective vahdity, in doubt. They may or they 
may not. He does not know. 

Mr. Herbert Spencer's attitude is, however, different 
and most interesting. Let me employ his words. 
'^ When we are taught that a piece of matter, regarded 
by us as existing externally, cannot be really known, but 
that we can only know certain impressions produced on 
us, we are yet, by the relativity of our thought, com- 
pelled to think of them in relation to a positive cause — 
the notion of a real existence which generated these 
impressions becomes nascent." '^ The momentum of 
thought inevitably carries us beyond conditioned exist- 
ence to unconditional existence." '<At the same time 



40 Religion for the Time 

that by the laws of thought we are rigorously prevented 
from forming a conception of absolute existence we are 
by the laws of thought equally prevented from ridding 
ourselves of the consciousness of absolute existence; 
this consciousness being, as we have seen, the obverse 
of our self-consciousness. '* ^ 

We may be certain, according to Mr. Spencer, that 
there is that behind the phenomena revealed to our 
senses of the existence of which we may be sure. What 
that something is, it is the peculiarity of his system to 
hold that we cannot know. This latter statement we 
shall be obliged to consider in the next conference. But 
the ground of his certainty that there is absolute exist- 
ence is of very great importance to us now. You recall 
his expressions, ** We are compelled to think of them in 
relation to a positive cause" — ^^ prevented from ridding 
ourselves of the consciousness, etc." Let us see how 
far this will take him. **It clearly shows us this, that 
starting with the doctrine that experience is the only 
source of knowledge, and making the first test of truth 
to consist in the inexpugnable persistence in conscious- 
ness, insisting throughout that, in its utmost limit, truth 
is simply the generalization of experience, he reaches a 
point where he is compelled to believe in something 
which is not the product of experience, of which he is 
not and never can be conscious, and which no general- 
ization of science can ever reach. . . . No matter 
how explained, no matter how well or how ill supported, 

» Quoted by Diman, «« Theistic Argument," p. 53. 



Agnosticism 41 

the simple fact remains, that the only guarantee for the 
fundamental conception on which philosophy is built is 
irresistible belief.'* ^ 

This is of the very highest consequence. For it shows 
us that a whole century and more of effort to disenthral 
science from the bondage and errors of pure thought, and 
in that way to open up in the sphere of knowledge 
heights and beauties which had been obscured and ren- 
dered inaccessible by the blindness and ponderous tread 
of metaphysical explorers, has resulted in the triumphant 
vindication of the claims of reason. If you wish to know 
anything in the realm of science, if you would induce that 
coy maiden to permit you to gaze upon her ever-varying 
loveliness, or partake of the wealth of her untold charms, 
you must approach her with perfect confidence in your 
equipment to discern and enjoy her favors, and to 
hearken as she whispers her secrets and woos you to 
sacrifices in her service. You have got a certain nature 
with which to achieve your triumphs. You must accom- 
plish them with that or not at all. 

Let us interrogate this reason, this final arbiter which 
those most anxious to escape from it find at last that they 
must exalt to the position of an oracle, and ask it what 
it has to say on the subject of sensation. The answer 
comes back in tones that cannot be mistaken, in every 
sensation there are two elements. There is the outside 
object impressing itself, and there is the intelligent being 
impressed. There is the feeling and the one who feels. It 

1 Quoted by Diman, ** Theistic Argument," p. 56. 



42 Religion for the Time 

is evident that there can be no such thing as a sensation 
that is not experienced by some one. And the latest 
manifestation has not advanced beyond v/hat was known 
two hundred years ago, when in answer to the assertion 
of Reid, *' There is nothing in the intellect which was 
not first in the senses/* Leibnitz replied, ''except the 
intellect itself 

No one has recognized this fact more fully or stated it 
more clearly than Mr. Herbert Spencer ; but then by an 
argument which shows his bondage to sense perception 
he arrives at the conclusion that the mind is prohibited 
by a law of thought from knowing itself. Nothing but 
his own language can do justice to his view. *' The 
mental act,'* he says, ''in which self is known implies, 
like every other mental act, a perceiving subject and an 
object perceived. If then the object perceived is self, 
what is the subject that perceives ? Or if it be the true 
self which thinks, what other self can be thought of? 
Clearly the true cognizance of self implies a state in 
which the knowing and the known are one, in which 
subject and object are identified ; and this is the annihi- 
lation of both. So that the personality of which each is 
conscious, and of which the existence is to each a fact 
beyond all others most certain, is yet a thing which can- 
not be known at all ; knowledge of it is forbidden by the 
very nature of thought.*' ^ 

If there can be found in language an equal number of 
words which contain as many contradictions as are to be 
found in this short passage they have not come under the 

^ Quoted by Momerie, " Agnosticism," p. 33, 



Agnosticism 43 

observation of the present writer. Is it not true that the 
things which we know best are those of which we are 
most certain? Do we not mean when we employ the 
word certainty to indicate a knowledge that we have 
taken pains to test ? Information has come to us. We 
know not whether it be true. We investigate it along 
the lines that are appropriate to its proof. We obtain 
satisfaction, and then we say that we are certain. And 
yet Mr. Spencer does not hesitate to say that here is 
something ; namely, our personality, of which the ex- 
istence is to each a fact beyond all others most certain, 
and *^is yet a thing that cannot be known at all." I ask 
you in all candor, can that language be interpreted to 
mean anything except a confession on the part of the 
writer that he is committed to a position which compels 
him to deny the possibility of knowledge from any source 
but the senses, and he must maintain it, be the cost what 
it may? This is one of the many instances which might 
be quoted, in which the writer, no matter how clever, 
who has undertaken to reject one of our fundamental 
intuitions expresses himself, apparently unconsciously, in 
a contradiction in terms. 

The fact is that when Mr. Spencer uses the phrase, 
^Uhe personality of which each is conscious,*' he states 
at once the truth and the proof of personality. For con- 
sciousness is that in which and by which all things are 
known. If for example I place my hand on this pulpit 
and feel it to be hard, what is that but another way of 
saying that I am conscious of the resistance which the 
material of this pulpit offers to my touch? Whether, 



44 Religion for the Time 

therefore, the apprehension be one which comes to me 
through the medium of one of my senses, or whether it 
be arrived at directly by my mind, in either conscious- 
ness is the only witness, and the validity of the one rests 
upon precisely the same basis as the other. And the 
last vestige of an argument is taken away from Mr. 
Spencer's statement when we say that the mind can and 
does become an object to itself, and the power by which 
it does so is self-consciousness. 

Mr. Tyndall has stated the duality of the world in 
which we think so precisely that it seems worth while to 
hear him. '^The passage from the physics of the brain 
to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. 
Granted that a definite thought and a definite molecular 
action in the brain occur simultaneously ; we do not pos- 
sess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment 
of the organ, which would enable us to pass by a process 
of reasoning from the one to the other. They appear 
together but we do not know why. Were our minds 
and senses so expanded as to see and feel the very 
molecules of the brain — were we capable of following all 
their motions, all their groupings, all their electrical dis- 
charges, if such there be ; and were we intimately ac- 
quainted with the corresponding state of thought and 
feeling — we should be as far as ever from the solution of 
the problem, ' How are these physical processes con- 
nected with the facts of consciousness?' The chasm 
between the two classes of phenomena would remain in- 
tellectually impassable.*' ^ 

1 " Lucretius," W. H. Mallock, p. 163. 



Agnosticism 45 

There can be no doubt then that there are the two 
spheres of matter and mind, and that no amount of con- 
fusion can be made to result in the fusion of the two. 
And we may dismiss as idle prattle the statements which 
have often been made with no little confidence and with 
considerable noise that *' thought is only a function of 
brain/' and that ^^ the brain secretes thought as the liver 
does bile.*' 

There are those who see that mind is involved in the 
very nature of sensation, who yet ascribe to it the same 
fleeting character which distinguishes sensation. We 
know nothing but a succession of impressions and 
thoughts they say. We cannot ascribe to the mind such 
a permanence as entitles us to regard it as an entity per- 
sisting with our personal life. The answer is to be found 
in the phenomena of memory. Perhaps we shall gain in 
clearness through the use of an illustration. You can 
recall the occasion of your confirmation. You had 
come to it with great seriousness and a determination to 
'^increase in the Holy Spirit more and more." Your 
parents and friends were there encouraging you by their 
affectionate sympathy. There was the priest to whom 
you owed so much for his instruction, counsel and kindly 
aid. There were your companions, and the bishop 
whom our Lord had made the medium of the Holy Spirit 
in His sevenfold gift to your soul. It may have been 
seven, ten, twenty, or more years ago ; but still you can 
recall it all with as much vividness as if it had taken place 
but yesterday. 

Now please observe that there are three distinct ele- 



46 Religion for the Time 

ments in this recollection which must be carefully dis- 
criminated. There is first the act of reminiscence. You 
can picture the solemn scene to your mind. There is 
secondly the memory that that great event in your life, 
so full of consequence, took place at a certain time in the 
past, seven, ten or more years ago. And the third that 
you are to-day the same individual who on that occasion 
knelt at the chancel rail and received the laying on of 
hands. You will at once perceive that the identity here is 
not that of your body, because you know, on other grounds, 
that every particle of your body has changed in the in- 
terval. What is it then that has persisted ? It is my 
personality, my ego. It is that which I call myself. It 
is my mind. It is that which perceives impressions and 
originates thoughts. It has not passed away with the 
sights and sentiments, with the aspirations and resolutions 
of that sacred hour long gone ; but is with me now to 
call up, not only the external features of the occasion but 
my innermost thoughts and feelings. It lifts my heart in 
gratitude to God for the grace which He then so lovingly 
bestowed, or, mayhap, it reproaches me in stern and 
stinging accents for my unfaithfulness to that grace. 

It seems, therefore, that we have really lost nothing of 
our grasp upon the existence and real objective being of 
the soul separate and apart from matter, and from all 
other kinds of being, through the speculations of this last 
century, which we have for convenience grouped under 
the popular name of Agnosticism. I am inclined to 
think that the only reasons why any one ever thought we 
had are one or both of these. First the individual was 



Agnosticism 47 

not a metaphysician, and did not heed or duly interpret 
the announcements of reason, in the sense in which I 
have said that I would employ that term in these confer- 
ences, which is the ultimate witness of the mind itself. 
In this aspect the man is literally an agnostic; /. ^., 
one who does not know. Because he does not know he 
cannot be my teacher, for I expect to learn only from 
one who has knowledge. The second class of writers 
who have led us astray are those who, while in many in- 
stances they have been men quite competent to deal with 
the subject, have nevertheless approached it with such a 
bias as prevented them from accurately interpreting the 
utterances of reason. They have been so sure at the out- 
set that our senses were the only avenues to knowledge 
that they were impervious to the testimony of that final 
witness which gave validity to even that which the senses 
themselves bore. 

And so we may sum up on the old lines which intuition- 
alists have observed at least since the days of Aristotle, 
and say that we know two substances, mind and matter. 
We know the one through impressions received from the 
senses, and the other by self-consciousness. We know 
them as possessed of different attributes. We know mat- 
ter as having extension, hardness, as occupying space 
and contained in space. We know mind as thinking, 
willing, imaging, remembering, loving. If we try to 
confuse these two spheres of being we find ourselves 
driven to employ language which is unintelligible. You 
could not for example attach any significance to the 
phrase the mind has three dimensions, length, breadth, 



48 Religion for the Time 

and thickness : nor would the statement that a particular 
stone possessed a wonderful power of affection, or had 
been known to manifest a supreme exertion of will, make 
much impression upon you, unless, perhaps, it might be 
that the individual who employed it ought not to be at 
large. 

About a century ago, when the journey from Philadel- 
phia to Pittsburgh occupied a week and was accomplished 
by stage-coach, the vehicle started one morning with a 
full load of passengers. They were of all ages, and both 
sexes. But conspicuous among them w^ere an aged 
Quaker and a young gallant of the period. And as the 
coach rolled joyously along the turnpike in response to the 
swift strides of the horses till they arrived perhaps at the 
boundaries of my parish the young gentleman became 
tired of the comparative insignificance attaching to a mere 
passenger and thought he would make himself known. 
To this end he endeavored to engage the Quaker in a 
religious controversy. But he did not obtain the re- 
sponse that appeared to be his due in consideration of 
the exalted character of the speaker and the arguments 
he advanced. And so he felt compelled to adopt a dif- 
ferent line of attack and he chose ridicule as most suited 
to his purpose. Did you ever see God ? No : replied 
the Quaker. Did you ever hear God ? No. Did you 
ever taste God ? No. Did you ever touch God ? No. 
Did you ever smell God ? No. Do you think there is 
any God ? But here the Friend instead of answering the 
question directly resorted to the method said to be char- 
acteristic of Scotchmen and asked another question. 



Agnosticism 49 

Did thee ever see thy brains ? No ; was the uncon- 
cerned reply. Did thee ever touch thy brains? No. 
Did thee ever smell thy brains? No. Did thee ever 
hear thy brains ? No. Did thee ever taste thy brains ? 
No. Does thee think thee has got any brains ? History 
does not record the reply ; but assures us that, either he 
did not consider the question worthy of an answer, or if 
he made one it was lost amid the shouts of laughter 
which the other occupants of the coach found it impos- 
sible to suppress. We are only told that the morose 
countenance and silent bearing of this premature agnostic 
for the rest of the journey was in striking contrast with 
the bonhomie of which he gave promise in the first ten 
miles. Looking back, however, on the Quaker's triumph 
dispassionately, as we may after the lapse of an hundred 
years, we should be inclined to say that it was one of 
humor rather than logic. But suppose we substitute for 
the word brains that of niifid ? How is it then ? I 
think we have saved the logic, and at the same time have 
lost nothing of the humor. That is the position in 
which it appears that the argument rests to-day. 

We saw that the state of mind induced by Agnosticism 
was far from desirable, those who had tested it them- 
selves being judges. Only an intellectual necessity 
could justify it ; and we have now seen that the final and 
clearly discerned judgment of the mind is unalterably 
opposed to it. What then is it which leads multitudes 
who know nothing of it as a system of thought to adopt 
it as a scheme of life ? Can it be anything else, is there 
any ground left on which to base an explanation, except 



50 Religion for the Time 

the gratification which is expected from a life given to 
material pleasures? We have read Sir John Lubbock's 
'^Pleasures of Life.'* He does not even hint at a gross 
view. He follows the teaching rather than the practice 
of Epicurus. But we must confess that if our lives are 
limited to joys so mild, of such rare occurrence and 
possible to so small a number of mankind the condition 
of the human race is not precisely one of bliss. I know 
that many people distrust the utterances of a clergyman 
on such a subject as being the available padding of his 
stock in trade. I appeal therefore to the votaries of 
fashion and luxury. Do they obtain such boundless 
happiness from their pursuits and pleasures as gives them 
real satisfaction ? What is the meaning of the vast in- 
crease of suicide in our time, and in every materialistic 
age which the world has ever seen ? Is it not the con- 
fession of the wearied devotee that, after a time, the 
gratification of the senses, whether it be of an higher or 
lower type, not merely ceases to be pleasure; but be- 
comes a burden too grievous to be borne ? Ah ! but 
men think if circumstances were only favorable this 
would not be. It seems however to be certain that 
those surrounded by the most advantageous conditions 
have held an opposite opinion. I will quote one that 
seems to be very striking and from a source whence we 
would least expect it. Gibbon after drawing that mag- 
nificent picture of the luxury, art, architecture and varied 
appliance for material enjoyment of the Saracens in 
Spain, with which many of you are familiar, proceeds to 
this comment : *' In a private condition our desires are 



Agnosticism 51 

perpetually repressed by poverty and subordination ; but 
the lives and labors of millions are devoted to the service 
of a despotic prince, whose laws are blindly obeyed and 
whose wishes are instantly gratified. Our imagination is 
dazzled by the splendid picture ; and whatever may be 
the cool dictates of reason, there are few among us who 
would obstinately refuse a trial of the comforts and the 
cares of royalty. It may, therefore, be of some use to 
borrow the experience of Abdalrahman, whose mag- 
nificence has perhaps excited our admiration and envy, 
and to transcribe an authentic memorial which was found 
in the closet of the deceased Caliph. *'I have now 
reigned above fifty years in victory or peace, beloved of 
my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by 
my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have 
waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear 
to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation I 
have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine 
happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to 
fourteen— O man,** this is his conclusion, ''place not 
thy confidence in this present world.*' ^ And this I 
venture to believe no unique or isolated conclusion, but 
that arrived at in one way or another by every human 
being who has made mere enjoyment the object of his 
life, and has lived long enough really to test his principle. 
And the reason why has been so aptly put by Carlyle 
that I will allow him to give it. ''We become men not 
after we have been dissipated, and disappointed in the 

1 " Dec. and Fall," x, 38. 



^2 Religion for the Time 

chase after false pleasure ; but after we have ascertained, 
in any way, what impassable barriers hem us in through 
this life ; how mad it is to hope for contentment to our 
infinite soul from the gifts of this extremely finite world ; 
that a man must be sufficient for himself; and that for 
suffering and enduring there is no remedy but striving 
and doing." ^ 

Plutarch tells us that at a certain period in the 
Tarentine war Caius Fabricius came in embassy from the 
Romans to treat about the prisoners. Pyrrhus, then in 
the full tide of victory, entertained him. *^At supper, 
amongst all sorts of things that were discoursed of, but 
more particularly Greece and the philosophers there, 
Cineas, by accident, had occasion to speak of Epicurus, 
and explained the opinions his followers hold about the 
gods and the commonwealth, and the objects of life, 
placing the chief happiness of man in pleasure, and de- 
clining public affairs as an injury and disturbance of a 
happy life, removing the gods afar off both from kindness or 
anger, or any concern for us at all, to a life wholly without 
business and flowing in pleasures. Before he had done 
speaking, ' O Hercules I ' Fabricius cried out to Pyrrhus, 
'may Pyrrhus and the Samnites entertain themselves 
with this sort of opinions as long as they are in war with 
us.' "2 

This I imagine would be the earnest wish of any hostile 
power. Positivism, every form of materialistic phi- 
losophy, has found its most favored home in France for 

1 Misc. I, 302, 2 Lives II, 26. 



Agnosticism 53 

more than two generations, and has been embraced by 
the people in numbers constantly swelling. And we 
have seen the pitiable spectacle of a great nation held up 
before the whole civilized world as a mark for obloquy 
and contempt. Not merely were her politics rotten, her 
army faithless, her legislature corrupt ; but the poison 
had sapped the integrity of even her judges on the bench. ^ 
This is the last depth of degradation to which a people 
can sink and continue to maintain its corporate life. 

Comte who in the earlier stages of his career sneered at 
religion as a foe to all that makes life desirable, as is well 
known, in his later days felt the promptings of those 
ineradicable instincts which demand that it shall have its 
place in human life. With the system he inaugurated 
we need not at present concern ourselves. Huxley 
wittily characterized it as ^'Catholicism minus Chris- 
tianity.*^ Having denied to himself the possibility of a 
God, he found it still necessary to erect some object of 
worship to which the affections, the aspirations, the 
longings of the soul might bow in adoration. He fixed 
upon humanity at large. But because experience showed 
this to be too vague to secure response from the varied 
promptings of the soul he had it personated in the woman 
who was the companion of his life. Before her therefore 
the elaborate ritual of his invention was executed. It is 
a curious commentary on the spell which infatuation has 
power to cast over even gifted minds. But let us not 
forget the lesson. When men restrict themselves to the 

1 The Dreyfus trial was then fresh in the memory of all. 



54 Religion for the Time 

knowledge which comes through the senses they come 
sooner or later, and generally sooner, to worship at the 
shrine of a strumpet ! That which is high and beautiful 
in life is unheeded if it be not wholly cast out ; and the 
capacity of man to maintain the bonds, which tie him to 
his fellows in a civilized state, is paralyzed. 



Ill 



THE CAUSAL JUDGMENT AND 
SOME OF ITS CONSEQUENCES 



CONFERENCE III 

THE CAUSAL JUDGMENT AND SOME OF ITS CONSE- 

QUENCES 

I AM to speak to you this evening of the Causal Judg- 
ment. 

It is a characteristic of our being which well deserves 
the title of a fundamental intuition. It is necessary, for 
it dominates all legitimate action of the human mind ; it 
is universal for the same reason, that is to say, no normal 
exertion of our intelligence can ignore it, much less utter 
itself in terms foreign to its dictation ; it is self-evident, 
by which I mean it is seen in its own light like the 
axioms of mathematics. When I say that two parallel 
straight lines being extended ever so far will never meet, 
I do not expect to be asked to furnish proof. If any 
individual should be under the impression that proof of 
the proposition were necessary I would simply think there 
was some serious lack in his mental constitution. It is 
the same with the Causal Judgment. And the Causal 
Judgment is this — every event must have a cause. This 
principle is of the very warp and woof of our intelligence. 
While it is probably awakened into activity by experience 
it, in itself, goes far beyond the domain of experience 
and affirms in tones which are impatient of all contradic- 
tion that, given the emergence of an event at any time or 

57 



58 Religion for the Time 

in any sphere whatsoever there must have been a cause 
present and operating to produce it. 

Now mark the spontaneous utterance of consciousness 
is not that everything must have a cause. We shall see 
the ground for this distinction in a moment. What is 
affirmed is that every new thing is produced by a force 
present, working and qualified to bring it into being. 
The idea of cause arises out of change. We see for 
example the two gases hydrogen and oxygen brought 
together in the proportion of two parts to one respect- 
ively, we hear an explosion and when next we look at 
the jar in which a moment ago there was nothing visible 
to the eye, we now behold water. We are instinctively 
sure that some cause has wrought the change. And 
when we ask the chemist he tells us that it is due to the 
union under favorable conditions of those two gases. 

You will at once perceive that if our minds are limited 
by their very constitution to the affirmation that every 
new existence which presents itself in the field of being 
must have had a cause there must be something which 
has existed from all eternity which was the ground-work 
of all subsequent changes. ''This is so evident and un- 
deniable a proposition,** says Samuel Clarke, ''that no 
atheist in any age has ever presumed to assert the con- 
trary. For since something now is, it is manifest that 
something always was. For whatever now is has a cause, 
a reason, a ground of its existence — a foundation on 
which its existence relies, a ground or reason why it doth 
exist ; and this foundation must have existed before it. 
That something, therefore, has really existed from all 



The Causal Judgment 59 

eternity is one of the certainest and most evident truths 
in the world, acknowledged by all men and disputed by 
none. Yet as to the manner how it can be, there is 
nothing in nature more difficult for the mind of man to 
conceive than this very first plain and self-evident truth. 
For how anything can have existed eternally, that is, how 
an eternal duration can be now actually past, is a thing 
utterly as impossible for our narrow understandings to 
comprehend as anything that is not an express contradic- 
tion can be imagined to be. And yet to deny the truth 
of the proposition that an eternal duration is now ac- 
tually past, would be to assert something far more unin- 
telligible, even an express and real contradiction.*' ^ 

We have necessarily answered, before stating, an ob- 
jection that has often been alleged. It has been said, 
**It is true that every event must have a cause; but 
why go back to a first cause? Does not an indefinite 
chain of causes satisfy, equally well, the demands of rea- 
son?** For example the coal which we burn in our 
houses for purposes of utility and beauty we know to be 
the result of the partial decay of great forests of the re- 
mote geological ages buried for aeons in the heart of the 
earth. Those huge primeval trees were brought to their 
immense growth by a great variety of causes. The sun 
gave them light and warmth, the air contributed those 
gases which kept them healthy and relieved them of the 
poisonous, and from the earth they derived their principal 
food. If we were to try to go further back we should 

1 Quoted by Mozley, Misc. II, 417-18. 



6o Religion for the Time 

seek the sources of the fecund properties in sun and air 
and earth. '* Now/* says the objector, ** why may we not 
continue this process and seek the cause, of what we find 
an operating cause, eternally? *' And the answer is that 
in the formation of the question you have been compelled 
to deny the very idea of a cause. You are simply exer- 
cising your ingenuity upon an antecedent. '^ Where the 
universe is thrown back upon an infinite succession," 
says Professor Diman,^ *^ there is a violation of the funda- 
mental principle of reason. For an infinite succession 
of causes rests, by the very hypothesis, upon no cause. 
Each particular cause rests, indeed, upon the next, but 
the whole rests on nothing. 'The reason,* says Kant, 
'is forced to seek somewhere its resting point in the 
regress of the conditional. If something exists, it must 
be admitted that something exists necessarily; for the 
contingent exists only under the condition of another 
thing as its cause, up to a cause which exists not con- 
tingently.* Reason cannot stop short of this.** 

With the positions we have so far taken, this evening, 
I think I may say all metaphysicians whether monists or 
theists are agreed. We therefore proceed to exhibit 
those positions in which it is thought possible to adhere 
to the declarations of reason and at the same time denude 
them of all content which would lead us on to God. 

Let it be borne in mind that the idea of a first cause is 
not a conclusion from the doctrine of causation, but a 
necessity of thought which springs out of it. The mind 

1" Theism,'' p. 85. 



The Causal Judgment 6l 

is compelled by the nature of its operations to posit a 
ground-work which will account for change when first it 
came to be. What is the nature of this ultimate being 
from which all modifications of being have in time pro- 
ceeded ? Is it mind or is it matter ? Has it intelligence, 
affection and will ; or is it mere force acting blindly ? 
These are the questions we must now answer. You 
know that the answer of our most advanced scientific 
writers is — matter and motion are all that our most care- 
ful investigations reveal. Let us endeavor briefly to 
grasp their view. All changes that come under our ob- 
servation we find to be the result of a certain amount of 
force exerted upon certain collocations of matter. As far 
back as we can trace the alterations which have taken 
place in the past in the heart of the earth or in the depths 
of the ocean, or as we observe them pursuing their end- 
less variations to-day it is everywhere the same. And 
so we arrive at these two postulates of the indestructibility 
of matter and the continuousness of motion. Here is 
the basis for the great doctrine of the conservation of 
force. All the phenomena of the universe are thus ac- 
counted for. If there is a necessity for an underlying 
entity which explains the beginning of those manifold 
operations of causality, which bewilder while they en- 
trance the mind, we have it here in the permanent ele- 
ment in nature. ^'For all effects,'* says Mr. Mill, 
'*may be traced up to it, while it cannot be traced up 
by our experience, to anything beyond.*' ^ 

1 The Essays, p. 145. Quoted by Diman, " Theis. Arg.," p. 90. 



62 Religion for the Time 

'^ By our experience.** We grant it. But we say that 
our minds are so constituted that they refuse to stop at 
the limit placed by the senses on action. They compel 
us to go on and ask the question whether this very mat- 
ter with all its marvellous capacities is not itself an effect. 
And we call the attention of the mere physicist to the 
circumstance that he has no ground on which to quarrel 
with us for so doing ; because he finds it necessary to 
employ the same kind of principle in a great number of 
instances. For example right here, *^ Strictly speaking, 
we have no proof of the proposition that force is persist- 
ent. It is a truth which does not admit of demonstra- 
tion. At the bottom of all demonstration there must lie 
an axiom which itself is undemonstrable. We are com- 
pelled to believe in the persistence of force, simply for 
the reason that it is impossible to conceive of something 
becoming nothing, or of nothing becoming something. 
We pass beyond the realm of experience and appeal to 
a psychological necessity.'* ^ 

The doctrine then that that which underlies all the 
changes which have occurred is matter, is a mere hypoth- 
esis. It is a device of the mind to satisfy one of its 
fundamental intuitions, namely, that every change must 
have a cause. It is purely metaphysical in its character. 
It stands therefore in no better position than does the 
alternative theistic ground, that the cause of all phe- 
nomena is an intelligence operating from without. But 
permit me to emphasize the fact that the tremendous 

1 Diman, " Theis. Arg./* p. 91. 



The Causal Judgment 63 

labor and thought, the fruits of which science has in our 
day presented us, and for which we can never sufficiently- 
express our gratitude, have made more than ever clear, 
that the doctrine of a first cause is a necessity of thought. 
If our brother in the domain of physical investigation 
can recognize nothing more in it than matter endued 
with its potencies, we are happy that he sees so much. 
We feel that the reason he sees no more is that his de- 
partment requires no more ; and if from our own special 
beautiful garden we may cull flowers which do not grow 
in his, it will be our happiness to present them to him ; 
and we trust that we may be able to make our gift with 
such humility, at once, and courtesy, that his eye may 
be attracted by the manifold beauty of their hues, and 
his nostrils regaled by their exquisite fragance. 

We advance, then, to the thought of order in the 
world, and ask what has this to teach us? We look up 
into the sky on some still clear night and see those 
myriads of shining worlds that everywhere dot the firma- 
ment. We know that they constitute great systems piled 
one on top of the other sweeping with incredible velocity 
through space, not merely beyond the furthest reach of 
vision, but that also of the most powerful lens of the 
most perfect telescope that has been constructed by the 
ingenuity of man, or will be; pursuing their way out 
into the remote distances which their orbits traverse till 
they compel us to exercise our intuition of the infinite 
and say that it has no limit. We look at the motions of 
this tiny part to which our earth belongs, with its many 
planets, some of which have moons, all revolving around 



64 Religion for the Time 

the sun at a rate which it makes the mind fairly swim to 
contemplate, never swerving an iota from their appointed 
paths, and their safety and that of all other systems too, 
dependent upon unvarying accuracy of movement. We 
do not wonder that Kant said that he never looked up at 
the starry heavens without being impressed by the senti- 
ment of the sublime ! I am sitting in my study prepar- 
ing for my morning's work as the sun shines in at my 
window. As I look upon the bright beams I see all sorts 
of specks and motes flitting and dancing as they play 
and jostle one another in the warm and genial rays. 
What are those minute particles of matter but miniatures 
of the spheres which inhabit space, and in my morning 
sunlight I have a veritable microcosm, a universe cut 
small. I can study the progress of worlds through the 
interstellar spaces, because I know that each little particle 
is held in its place and its motions determined by that 
same great force which lies back of what we know as the 
law of gravitation. We know the exact mode and meas- 
ure of its operation ; but the force itself is an impene- 
trable mystery. 

We know also that the laws which determine the order 
and regularity which is everywhere discoverable in na- 
ture are identical with those which the human mind has 
arrived at by its own independent investigations. Thus, 
for example, the varied and beautiful forms of the snow- 
flakes, the little crystals which form on the side-walk 
after a rain when the frost comes suddenly upon it, 
as also the more exquisite specimens of quartz which 
have for ages been entombed in the heart of the earth in 



The Causal Judgment 65 

all their splendor and in all their variety are formed on 
precisely the same principles as those enunciated by 
Euclid. They are in fact nothing but frozen geometry. 
It is well known that the same law, that of the conic 
sections, which Kepler discovered to be that which de- 
ttermines the movements of the heavenly bodies is pre- 
cisely that which the Arabian students worked out for 
themselves two thousand years before in the realm of 
pure mathematics. And when Kepler after years of in- 
credible toil at last was convinced of this he exclaimed : 
" O God, I do but think Thy thoughts after Thee ! '' 

This outburst of sentiment on the part of one of the 
greatest and most fascinating thinkers the world has ever 
seen, we, cannot but regard as the legitimate inference of 
the human mind, when the facts are brought to its atten- 
tion. If you go into a great factory and, as you proceed 
from one department to another, observe that the ma- 
chinery in each works with entire accuracy, and that all 
is kept in motion by a single engine on the first floor, the 
conclusion is irresistible that the harmony existing be- 
tween all the parts is the result of intelligence. I take 
this most interesting illustration from Mr. Tyndall. 

There have been writers who affirmed that the pyra- 
mids of Egypt were the productions of nature; and in 
his early youth Alexander Von Humboldt wrote a learned 
essay with the express object of refuting this notion. 
We now regard the pyramids as the work of men's hands, 
aided probably by machinery of which no record re- 
mains. We picture to ourselves the swarming workers 
toiling at those vast erections, lifting the inert stones, 



66 Religion for the Time 

and, guided by the volition, the skill, and possibly at 
times by the whip of the architect, placing them in their 
proper positions. The blocks in this case were moved 
and posited by a power external to themselves, and the 
final form of the pyramid expressed the thought of its 
human builder. 

Let us pass from this illustration of constructive power 
to another of a different kind. When a solution of com- 
mon salt is slowly evaporated, the water which holds the 
salt in solution disappears, but the salt itself remains be- 
hind. At a certain stage of concentration the salt can 
no longer retain the liquid form ; its particles, or mole- 
cules, as they are called, begin to deposit themselves as 
minute solids, so minute indeed as to defy all microscopic 
power. As evaporation continues solidification goes on, 
and we finally obtain through the clustering together of 
innumerable molecules, a finite crystalline mass of a 
definite form. What is this form ? It sometimes seems 
a mimicry of the architecture of Egypt. We have little 
pyramids built by the salt, terrace above terrace from 
base to apex, forming a series of steps resembling those 
up which the Egyptian traveller is dragged by his guides. 
The human mind is as little disposed to look unquestion- 
ing! y at these pyramidal salt-crystals, as to look at the 
pyramids of Egypt without inquiring whence they came. 
How then are those salt-pyramids built up ? 

<'The scientific idea is that the molecules act upon 
each other without the intervention of slave labor ; that 
they attract each other and repel each other at certain 
definite points, or poles, and in certain definite direc- 



The Causal Judgment 67 

tions ; and that the pyramidal form is the result of this 
play of attraction and repulsion. While then the blocks 
of Egypt were laid down by a power external to them- 
selves, these molecular blocks of salt are self-posited, be- 
ing fixed in their places by the forces with which they 
act upon each other. . . . Everywhere . . 
throughout inorganic nature we have this formative 
power, as Fichte would call it, this structural energy 
ready to come into play, and build the ultimate particles 
of matter into definite shapes.'' ^ 

There is something further which the attentive student 
of nature cannot fail to observe. I mean the adaptation 
of organ to function, of means to end which meets us 
everywhere in the teeming life which inhabits our earth. 
It is a very difficult matter to represent this aspect of our 
subject in a small compass because to appreciate it we 
should be obliged to bring before us the structure and 
performances of the leading animals of the world. So 
you see we suffer here, as indeed we do all through these 
conferences, from an embarrassment of riches, from the 
necessity of putting into a short hour, what indeed is en- 
titled to a volume, and demands as much. 

If then you should study the anatomy of the different 
animals in the world you would find that, with endless 
modification to be sure, they were all constructed on one 
general plan. If again you inquired into the instincts 
of animals you would be introduced into a whole new 
world of wonder. The little bee for instance is hardly 

1 " Use and Limit of Imagination in Science," p. 58. 



68 Religion for the Time 

hatched before he starts off in search of flowers he has 
never seen, in order that he may gather up honey not so 
much to satisfy his own hunger as to provide for the 
wants of a colony into which he has just been introduced, 
and of whose needs he has therefore had no experience, 
and cannot know. And part of the nourishment which 
his industry brings home is of such a character as to 
produce organic changes in some of his sisters in order 
that in time to come they may become queens and reign 
over him. I need hardly say to you that if the intelli- 
gence by which he works was his own he would not be 
likely to make this use of it ! 

In the same way spiders have never seen the animals 
for which they prepare traps, and the spinning machinery 
which they bring into the world is exactly adapted to the 
secretion out of which their web is formed ; and they 
place it in just those favorable locations where they are 
most likely to catch their prey. 

The human eye is a marvellous piece of mechanism 
the close study of which would probably convince any 
one of an adjustment of means to an end which implies 
purpose. Let us, however, find our principal illustration 
in the adaptation of birds to their rapid flight. We 
would think at first sight that the law of gravitation 
would be fatal to their passage through the air. But this 
proves to be the very force which enables them to find 
their way and gives them speed. The reason why a 
balloon is at the mercy of every blast it may encounter in 
the upper air is that it is so light. But the birds being 
much heavier than the atmosphere can obtain a momen- 



I 

The Causal Judgment 69 

turn in it, can pass at will in any direction, and even face 
and overcome terrific gales. But why does not gravity 
arrest the flight of the aerial traveller and confine him a 
prisoner on the earth ? The reason is that the bird is so 
constructed that he can convert the very lightness of the 
air into a force capable of overcoming gravity. The 
muscles of his wings are so rigid and so elastic, he 
strikes the air with such force and repeats the blow with 
such rapidity as enables him at will to mount above the 
earth. But why does not the upward flapping of the 
wing drive him down as much as the downward tends to 
raise him ? To this the answer is that the feathers of his 
wings under-lap, so that they close upon each other and 
hold the air as they strike down, but as they recover for 
the next stroke open and permit the air to pass freely 
through. What we have now seen, you observe, ac- 
counts for the ability of the inhabitant of the air to 
maintain a certain position, but we still need to explain 
how he can advance with a rapidity which distances the 
fleetest residents of the earth. This is due to the shape 
of the wings and the adjustment of the feathers. The 
wings are, as you know, concave on the lower side. The 
feathers are fixed into the wing by cartilage which holds 
them with the utmost firmness. But the feathers tend to 
less rigidity and become very pliant towards the end ; so 
that the air as it is beat upon tends to rush back and es- 
cape, and as it does so gives the forward impulse to the 
bird. It is all, I think you will feel, a marvellous ex- 
ample of how contrivance has bent to its purposes the 
immutability of law. Here is something, the naviga- 



yo Religion for the Time 

tion of the air, on which the ingenuity of man has 
taxed itself for many centuries and thus far without ma- 
terial result. But nature has accomplished it in the 
simplest way possible, we may add in the only way pos- 
sible. If any element in the problem had been over- 
looked by the great Artificer of nature the bird might 
have fluttered upon the earth, like a scolding hen, but it 
would never have risen aloft. But so exquisite is the 
touch of that Hand that the eagle can soar to heights 
where the human eye cannot follow it and the wild goose 
can traverse a continent in search of its winter home. 
You see in the effort to describe these wonderful adapta- 
tions of organ to function of which the world is full we 
unconsciously fall into the use of language which implies 
intellect and design in its Author ; so natural is it to the 
human mind to attribute them to a Person. 

Mr. Baden Powell has summed up this aspect of the 
argument with such clearness that we adopt his words. 
''If we read a book which it requires much thought and 
exercise of reason to understand, but which we find dis- 
closes more and more truth and reason as we proceed in 
the study, and contains clearly more than we can at 
present comprehend, then undeniably we properly say 
that thought and reason exist in that book irrespectively 
of our minds, and equally so of every question as to its 
author or origin. Such a book confessedly exists and is 
open to us in the natural world. When the astronomer, 
the physicist, the geologist, or the naturalist notes down 
a series of observed facts or measured dates, he is not an 
author expressing his own ideas, he is a mere amanuen- 



The Causal Judgment 71 

sis taking down the dictations of nature ; his observation 
book is the record of the thoughts of another mind ; he 
has but set down literally what he himself does not un- 
derstand, or only very imperfectly. 

**That which requires thought and reason to under- 
stand must be itself thought and reason. That which 
mind alone can investigate or express must be itself 
mind. And if the highest conception attained is but 
partial, then the mind and reason studied is greater than 
the mind and reason of the student. If the more it be 
studied the more vast and complex is the necessary con- 
nection in reason disclosed, then the more evident is the 
vast extent and compass of the intelligence thus partially 
manifested, and its reality, as existing in the immutably 
connected order of objects examined, independently of 
the mind of the investigator.*' ^ 

That it may not be thought that this line of argument 
is an invention of those instructed by Revelation, and 
designed by them to maintain its positions, I will simply 
allude to the fact, that every schoolboy preparing for 
college knows, that it has been observed by no one with 
more clearness than by Socrates.^ Since his day it has 
been upheld with practical unanimity by the leaders of 
thought down to the present time. 

But within a generation an hypothesis has been ad- 
vanced which is supposed by many to have overturned 
the entire structure of teleology, — to have made it ridicu- 
lous longer to look for a final cause in the order and 

1 Quoted by Diman, " Theistic Argument," p. Ii6. 

2 Xenophon, " Memor.," Bk. I, chap. iv. 



72 Religion for the Time 

adaptation everywhere thrust upon us in nature. The 
doctrine of evolution is this new light which is held 
to have banished the darkness in which the world has 
hitherto been enveloped. There are two senses in which 
the word evolution or development is employed, which 
stand for very different things, the failure to distinguish 
which has often caused great confusion, and which must 
therefore be carefully discriminated. I shall call them 
scientific and non-scientific evolution. By the former I 
mtend to designate that painstaking observation of facts, 
their collocation and comparison, and finally the legiti- 
mate deductions from them, which illumine the pages, 
and constitute the fame of Darwin and Wallace and 
many others. These men have shown that there is a 
tendency in nature from the simpler to the more com- 
plex, from the lower to the higher, from the less to the 
more perfect. The view is so familiar to all at the 
present day that it is unnecessary that I attempt a de- 
tailed description. It is sufficient that I merely indicate 
what I refer to. Let us be proud, then, to acknowledge 
in the elaborators of the facts and methods of evolution 
distinguished servants of our race, and the grand results 
achieved by them. But does their conspicuous contri- 
bution to our knowledge affect the inference from the 
order everywhere manifested in the inorganic, and the 
adjustment equally universal in the organic world, that 
the one demands intelligence, and the other reveals pur- 
pose, as its explanation? I think except to make the 
conclusion more irresistible, and the conception more 
sublime, that it does not. 



The Causal Judgment 73 

Suppose we admit the truth of the nebular hypothesis 
— and we ought to say that physicists of the first class 
regard it as by no means proved. This is as far back 
as science has attempted to go. We have then in the 
gaseous mass, so hot that life, much less consciousness 
or intelligence are impossible, a swiftness of motion, and 
conditions of condensation through loss of heat, which 
by the development of the capacities inherent in it, 
eventually brings forth the solar system with its mani- 
fold beauty and abundant life. You see that if we admit 
all this we have simply described the process by which 
what formerly existed in one condition has passed to its 
present state. We have explained nothing, except the 
method of procedure. If we say that it has all been 
accomplished by law we are not giving an account of the 
matter, but only committing an offense against logic ; 
for law in this connection is nothing but observed order, 
and it is this very order that we are under obligation to 
explain. It all amounts to this. We have an order in 
the world to-day. We can trace some of the steps by 
which it has been arrived at. Each subsequent stage of 
more complicated regularity has emerged from a previous 
one more simple. Back and back, as far as you can 
push it, you still have an order, the existence of which is 
just as difficult to account for, as are the more intricate 
manifestations which have grown out of it at a later day. 
If you admit that in the first instance that order issued 
from intelligence of so vast a comprehension that, what 
at present captivates our minds, was by it bound up and 
intended in the first fiery cloud, we have at once the 



74 Religion for the Time 

grandest explanation of the present form of the universe 
which has ever been conceived ; and a resting-place for 
the human mind. 

It is the same with the adaptations to be found in all 
animal life. Natural selection needs to be explained but 
explains nothing. Professor Weissman ^ has told us that 
there is not a particle of evidence for it. It is main- 
tained to avert the necessity of falling back on the old 
theory of design. It is a name for the description of an 
observed fact in nature — that there is a tendency to im- 
provement. Now in the nature of things there is no 
more reason why animals should advance than that they 
should degenerate. But the fact shows development to 
be the law. It is accomplished by the adjustment of the 
being to its environment. And the fact that the fittest 
survive, and from generation to generation tend to be- 
come more fit, so far from militating against the doctrine 
of design, becomes itself a powerful evidence of the 
existence of a purpose running through all nature and 
accomplishing, slowly it is true, the magnificent result 
contemplated from the first. 

1 Oxford Address, Churchman^ Sept. 8, 1894. His exact words 
are : " We accept natural selection not because we are able to de- 
monstrate the process in detail, not even because we can with more or 
less ease imagine it, but simply because we must — because it is the 
only possible explanation that we can conceive. We must assume 
natural selection to be the principle of the metamorphoses, because 
all other apparent principles of explanation fail us, and it is incon- 
ceivable that there could yet be another capable of explaining the 
adaptation of organisms without assuming the help of the principle 
of design." . . _ . _ 



The Causal Judgment 75 

We are glad to quote Mr. Huxley in support of our 
position. '^Thereisa . . . teleology which is not 
touched by the doctrine of evolution, but is actually 
based upon the fundamental proposition of evolution. 
That proposition is that the whole world living and not 
living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according 
to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules 
of which the primary nebulosity was composed. From 
this it follows that the existing world lay potentially in 
the cosmic vapor; and that a sufficient intelHgence 
could, from a knowledge of the properties of the mole- 
cules of that vapor, have predicted, say, the state of the 
fauna of Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one 
can tell what will happen to the vapor of breath in a 
cold winter's day. . . . The more purely a mech- 
anist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume 
the primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the 
phenomena of the universe are the consequences; and 
the more completely is he thereby at the mercy of the 
teleologist, who can always defy him to prove, that this 
primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to 
evolve the phenomena of the universe.*' ^ 

By the non-scientific theory of development we mean 
that which alleges the eternity of matter. According to 
this the properties which have wrought all the marvellous 
changes in the world, and produced the life and beauty 
in which we luxuriate were inherent in it always. The 
first remark we have to make in criticism is that it is a 

1 Quoted by Momerie, "Agnosticism," pp. 13S-40. 



76 Religion for the Time 

purely metaphysical conception. It is obvious that no 
man was present to observe the action of the forces 
originally at work in the primeval atoms, if such they 
were, and neither is there any way of going back to that 
azoic time and compelling it to yield up its secrets. All 
is pure conjecture. The only method by which validity 
can be given to any speculation in such a direction is 
that which comes from the reason proper. We shall see 
in a few moments where reason points ; but in the mean- 
time it is most important to keep in mind what we have 
now seen. Many people and some eminent physicists 
have loudly proclaimed that matter had been demon- 
strated by the results of recent investigations to be capa- 
ble of accounting for all that the world to-day exhibits. 
Mr. Spencer who has given us an elaborate account of 
what he supposes to have been the process of the evolu- 
tion of matter from its simplest forms to its present com- 
plex and varied manifestations conjectures that at the 
beginning there were molecules all under one homoge- 
neous law. Where the molecules came from, and where 
the law, he does not favor us by saying. It is idle to 
affirm that from the nature of the case this is unknowa- 
ble ; because it is the very problem under consideration, 
and if every supporter of a speculative tenet had simply 
to go on till he met with an insurmountable obstacle, and 
then allege that he had reached the boundary of knowl- 
edge, it is evident that nothing could be proved, and no 
progress in knowledge would be possible. 

The next remark that I have to make upon this non- 
scientific theory of development is that, disguise it as you 



The Causal Judgment 77 

will, it is after all nothing but the old Epicurean doctrine 
of chance. Modern culture has nothing to add to it 
which is not found in the well-known statement of Lucre- 
tius.^ The original atoms flying about in all directions, 
under the impetus of a motion, the origin of which is not 
pointed out, after combinations innumerable through im- 
mense ages of time, by a fortuitous concurrence, one day 
hit upon that one which produced the present world. 
The theory is preposterous. It may be admitted that in 
a long period of time accident might produce many won- 
derful things. But this universe, made up of system 
upon system, reaching out into the illimitable stretches 
of space, all observing an order so perfect that the slight- 
est departure from it- of any single orb would be its in- 
stant ruin, and in turn the wreck of world upon world, 
this is too much to have come about by chance. It is 
sometimes felt that clergymen are easily gulled and can 
believe a great many incredible things. But, my breth- 
ren, I think that you will believe me when I tell you that 
no clergyman ever asked of any one an exercise of inno- 
cent, unsuspecting credulity at all comparable to this ! 
On this subject, as on most others, when clearly under- 
stood, we can obtain the aid of science. If the minute 
and patient investigations of the last half century have 
demonstrated anything it is that everything large or 
small is under the reign of law. Chance finds no place 
that the closest observations can discover ; and that it 
could have brought about the arrangement of the cos- 

• 

1 " De Rerum Natura," Bk. I, 1021-1028. 



yS Religion for the Time 

mical forces, which have produced the harmony and 
adaptation, which make the fair face of nature, probably 
no man, who thinks of what he is saying, will to-day allege. 
Professor Virchow, than whom probably no man in the 
scientific world was more competent to speak and to 
whose sound judgment Max Miiller^ pays tribute, lays 
bare the unscientific character of development specula- 
tion in terms that it will do well for us to hear. '* With 
Darwinism, the theory of spontaneous generation has 
again been brought to the front. I fully admit that the 
temptation is strong to add this crowning stone to the 
theory of man's descent. There is something satisfactory 
in being able to admit that a certain favored group of 
atoms. Carbon & Co., were at a given moment and 
under certain circumstances, separated from ordinary 
coal and gave birth to the primitive plasson, and that the 
same process is being repeated to-day. It is true no one 
can adduce a single positive fact in evidence that such 
spontaneous generation ever took place, and that an in- 
organic mass, even of this firm of Carbon & Co., was 
ever transformed into an organic mass. Nevertheless, I 
admit that if we propose to imagine to ourselves how 
the first organic being could have originated there is no 
alternative but spontaneous generation, unless we recur to 
creation. Tertium non datur. But spontaneous genera- 
tion is not demonstrated, and we shall be wise to wait for 
its demonstration. We remember how lamentably all 
attempts have failed to find a place for it in tracing the 

» " Nat. Rel.," p. 367. 



The Causal Judgment 79 

passage of the most elementary forms from the inorganic 
to the organic kingdom. Haeckel will never be able to 
explain to us how, from the midst of this inorganic 
world, in which nothing changes, life came forth. The 
lapse of countless ages makes no change in mechanical 
laws. And if we go back to the periods of incandescence 
in the history of our planet, we may fairly be reminded 
that intense heat is far more destructive than productive 
of life. '^^ 

There is still another hypothesis which the upholder 
of theism must meet. The order and adjustment of 
nature are granted as arguing intelligence and purpose. 
But we are told by the pantheist that they exist and are 
inherent in the world itself. The defenders of this view 
point to the automatic action of some parts of the nervous 
system as an illustration. You are pricked in the hand 
by a pin. Immediately you draw back your hand and 
of course the purpose is to prevent a repetition of the 
painful contact. Here is an exhibition of design, and 
yet the action is not conscious in the proper sense of the 
word, (so they affirm) because the seat of those nerves is 
not in the brain proper but the medulla oblongata, or 
possibly the gangha of the spine. 

The instincts of animals are, however, the illustration 
chiefly rehed upon to show that the mind displayed in 
nature is resident in and bound up with nature. Atten- 
tion is called to the curious fact that the bee forms his 
hive on the same mechanical principles as those pursued 

* Quoted by Pressense, " Study of Origins," p. 217. 



8o Religion for the Time 

by our most accomplished engineers in the erection of 
those great structures which are the marvels of civiliza- 
tion. Had the dam across the Conemaugh river been laid 
with half the skill shown by the beaver when he prepares 
an abode for his family the Johnstown flood would never 
have produced its terrible devastation. It is not dis- 
puted that these and all other manifestations of instinctive 
intelligence are unconscious. Here we have before us 
then, so it is argued, in nature itself an example of how she 
proceeds, blindly it is true, to achieve the works which 
we incline to attribute to mind. We answer first that 
this, after all, leaves unexplained the principal question ; 
which is, in the words of Professor Diman, ^^how can a 
cause attain an end by appropriate means, without either 
having known that end or selected those means ? Out 
of an infinite number of directions in which the cause 
might have acted, what limited it to that one direction 
which alone would produce the desired result ? '* ^ 

But we further ask why take the brute creation, and 
that in one of the least understood of all the phenomena 
it displays ; namely, its instinctive action, as the type of 
the power by which the wonderful works of the universe 
were achieved? Is there not something far higher, is 
there not that of which we have far more accurate 
knowledge whence we may draw inferences concerning 
the nature and action of this intelligence which we behold 
at every turn in the world around us ? Let us interro- 
gate our own minds. What is almost the first fact of 

1 " Theistic Argument," p. 218. 



The Causal Judgment 81 

• 

which they inform us when they awake to consciousness ? 
It is that each of us is an agent — he can achieve results. 
He has a will, and by it he can direct the forces within 
his reach to this or that end as he may choose. Do not 
confuse the question before us with others with which we 
have at present no concern ; as for instance the nature 
of the will, its limitations or the power of motives. Let 
us confine ourselves to this supreme fact of our spiritual 
life that when we please, and, to a great extent, as we 
please, we may become causes. Now let us consider one 
of the most remarkable of the scientific discoveries of 
modern times. Whenever in the physical world a 
change of any sort takes place we find a force or forces 
at work. We find that the vicissitudes through which 
force and matter are continually passing do not lessen, 
do not increase the sum of force. As far as we can dis- 
cover that is a fixed quantity in the universe ; moreover we 
find that the various forces are convertible into one another, 
and all our knowledge points to the conclusion that ulti- 
mately all force is one, various in its operations, homo- 
geneous in itself. Can it be will ? If it be we have an 
explanation of the intelligence and design written on the 
face of nature, an explanation even of the wonders 
achieved by instinct. If the anima mimdi is a spirit 
intelligent and free, operating in nature, while superior to 
it, every demand of our reason is met as we contemplate 
the beauty and utility of all created things. If we regard 
it as identical with the world we both fail to find an ex- 
planation at all, and are obliged to confess that we have 
sought one in an inferior and obscure sphere when we 



82 Religion for the Time 

might have directed our researches to the highest known 
to man and lit up by the full splendor of ascertained 
psychological law. We have floundered in the marshes, 
when we might have walked gaily upon the mountain- 
top cheered by the sun and regaled by the fresh pure air. 
This is one of the many points at which he who would 
reject Theism, leaving altogether aside the fact that reason 
rebukes him, must take a lower ground. 

Looking back over the whole effort to account for the 
world without an intelligent and free Creator from the 
days of Epicurus, who first undertook the task, to Mr. 
Spencer, who in our own time has addressed his varied 
powers and vast information to its accomplishment, it 
reminds one more vividly of the conversation between 
the little farmer's boy and his father than anything we 
can recall having seen : 

Say, PaJ I'll bet I know why a man can't begin at the 
top in buildin' a haystack ! 

Why, he can't simply because he can't, an' that's all 
there is to it ! 

No, it ain't. Pa. S'pose he'd begin at the top an* 
then wouldn't have hay enough ter git ter the ground ! 
What then ? 

The answer of the father expresses the facts of the 
case, that of the boy the experience of all who have had 
the temerity to run counter to them. Or if we adopt the 
language of scripture, ^^ the bed is shorter than that a 
man can stretch himself on it, and the covering narrower 
than that he can wrap himself in it." ^ 

1 Is. 28 : 20. 



The Causal Judgment 83 

Let us now glance back for a moment over the ground 
which we have travelled. From the self-evident proposi- 
tion that every event must have a cause, we have found 
ourselves driven at the behest of reason back to a first 
cause — the ground-work of every change, 

" Creation's cause, Thyself uncaused." 

We have looked at the universe, and have seen that it is an 
effect, made up of an infinite number of effects, which 
separately or in the aggregate demand to be accounted 
for. We have found that it shows everywhere mind 
working towards result — in other words development, 
and that these characteristics argue intellect and will ; 
and therefore if we are to account for the plainest facts 
of the universe we must believe that the Cause of all is 
intelligent and free. This is as far as we have tried to 
advance. Natural Religion tells us a great deal more 
than this. But do not let us make the mistake of trying 
to infer more from our present premises. The goodness 
of God, His providential rule and infinite Being we shall 
endeavor to advance to in succeeding conferences. 
Meanwhile, we have laid the basis of Theism on the im- 
movable rock of reason, and have built up the wall one 
story or two. This, I trust, you feel is no small compensa- 
tion for your labors. 



rv 
CONSCIENCE AND WILL 



CONFERENCE IV 

CONSCIENCE AND WILL 

It is impracticable to consider conscience and will 
apart. They touch each other at almost every point, 
and run into each other at the most unexpected turns. 
It seems, however, wise to consider conscience first, as- 
suming the existence and freedom of the will, and later to 
give the will the share of consideration to which it is so 
eminently entitled. 

The first subject which challenges the attention of him 
who would treat the conscience, or indeed almost any 
department of thought to-day, is that which last came 
before us, evolution. What was said on that former oc- 
casion of its claim to account for the genesis of the 
world we wish to hold when it bids us follow its leading 
in the loftier sphere of our moral life. As long as it 
confines itself to the scientific observation and arrange- 
ment of facts and the deductions from them we are its 
sympathetic friends and pupils. The moment, however, 
it passes this boundary, the instant it enters the domain 
where the phenomena are those beyond the reach of the 
senses and transcending all experience, we must bring it 
to the bar of a strict metaphysical enquiry. It will thus 
be seen that we may admit the evolutionary theory of 
ethics as far as it acknowledges the facts of our moral 

^7 



88 Religion for the Time 

life. Whether it renders a competent account of the 
origin of those facts we shall be obliged to consider when 
the question of moral sanctions comes before us. But 
whether conscience is the result of an immediate creation 
or whether it has been brought to its present state by 
very gradual advances, made during the lapse of an in- 
definite period of years, it will still be seen to exalt us to 
an height more elevated and far more glorious than even 
intellect itself. And the current of our investigation is 
rendered particularly smooth at this portion of the stream 
of our argument by the fact that there is no dispute, at 
least among the higher type of development moralists, 
between theist and monist as to what the manifestations 
of conscience are. We may then ask them to appear 
and display themselves. 

Perhaps they will more readily accede to our request 
if we borrow the description of a master. '* Conscience 
has an intimate bearing on our affections and emotions, 
leading us to reverence and awe, hope and fear, a feeling 
which is foreign for the most part, not only to taste, but 
even to the moral sense, except in consequence of acci- 
dental associations. No fear is felt by any one who 
recognizes that his conduct has not been beautiful, though 
he may be mortified at himself, if perhaps he has thereby 
forfeited some advantage, but if he has been betrayed 
into any kind of immorality, he has a lively sense of re- 
sponsibility and guilt, though the act be no offense 
against society, — of distress and apprehension, even 
though it may be of present service to him, — of com- 
punction and regret, though in itself it be most pleas- 



Conscience and Will 89 

urable, — of confusion of face, though it may have no 
witnesses. These various perturbations of mind, which 
are characteristic of a bad conscience, and may be very 
considerable, — self-reproach, poignant shame, haunting 
remorse, chill dismay at the prospect of the future, — and 
their contraries, when the conscience is good, as real 
though less forcible, — self-approval, inward peace, light- 
ness of heart, and the like, — these emotions constitute a 
specific difference between conscience and our other in- 
tellectual senses, — common sense, good sense, sense of 
expedience, taste, sense of honor and the like." ^ 

In these words of one of the greatest thinkers of the 
last century, I trust that we all feel that we have a calm 
and accurate portrayal of the phenomena of conscience 
devoid of all exaggeration. Its function is to accuse or 
else excuse. It fills the soul with the blissful sense of 
joy which comes from the perception of duty done, or it 
haunts the man with *' a fearful looking for of judgment " 
due to his dereliction. ''It asserts an imperious sway 
over body and mind, over appetites and affections and 
faculties ; yet it never claims to do this by any authority 
of its own. It does not lay down a law, but simply 
warns us of the existence of a law. Its authority is not 
original but derived ; in its sternest aspects it never 
speaks but with a delegated voice. 

"Hence while the direct function of conscience is to 
discriminate the right and wrong in actions, while its 
immediate sphere is the .human will, it goes far beyond 

' Newman, " Gram. Assent.," p. io8. 



90 Religion for the Time 

this. In fact it can perform those functions only in this 
way. It carries the soul outside of itself, and brings the 
will before a bar independent of its own impulses. It 
inevitably awakens in the soul the perception of a moral 
law — universal, unchangeable, binding under all circum- 
stances, in short a moral order of the world analogous to 
the physical order which it is the province of science to 
trace and illustrate.*' ^ 

Just as conscience witnesses to a law, so the moral 
sense testifies to a purpose. As it has been said that at 
this point English ethics has made its sole contribution to 
the science, we shall do well to hear Bishop Butler, its great 
exponent. *' If," he says, '^ the real nature of any crea- 
ture leads him, and is adapted to such and such purposes 
only, or more than to any other ; this is reason to believe 
the author of that nature intended it for those purposes." 
'^ A man can as little doubt whether his eyes were given 
him to see with as he can doubt of the truth of the 
science of optics deduced from ocular experiments. 
And allowing the inward feeling, shame ; a man can as 
little doubt whether it was given him to prevent his doing 
shameful actions as he can doubt whether his eyes were 
given him to guide his steps." And again — ''there is a 
superior principle of reflection or conscience in every 
man, which distinguishes between the internal principles 
of his heart as well as his external actions ; which passes 
judgment upon himself and them; pronounces deter- 
minately some actions to be in themselves just, right, 

1 Diman, " Theis. Arg.," 248-9. 



Conscience and Will 91 

good ; others to be in themselves evil, wrong, unjust : 
which without being consulted, without being advised 
with, magisterially exerts itself, and approves or con- 
demns him, the doer of them accordingly ; and if not 
forcibly stopped, naturally, and always of course goes 
on to anticipate a higher and more effectual sentence, 
which shall hereafter second and affirm its own. . . . 
This faculty is ' not merely to be considered as a prin- 
ciple in his heart, which is to have some influence as well 
as others ; but considered as a faculty, in kind and in na- 
ture, supreme over all others, and which bears its own 
authority of being so.' To preside and govern, from 
the very economy and constitution of man, belongs to it. 
Had it strength, as it has right ; had it power as it has 
manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the 
world.*' ^ 

As we have seen that the law which conscience un- 
questionably witnesses to is that of another, so the purpose 
which the moral sense brings irresistibly before our minds 
is not our own. Our own pursuits may be, and often 
are, opposed to it. But then it is in our inmost being 
faithfully, persistently admonishing us that the aim of our 
being, that in the light of which all other ends pale as 
the lights of a city before the splendor of the rising sun, 
is that we should correspond with the ideal which is held 
up before us by the law which our spirits clearly discern ; 
and more clearly, and in ever increasing beauty as the 
inner vision becomes keener and stronger by training. 

1 " Sermons," pp. 48, 50, 56, 60. 



gi Religion for the Time 

You see we are avoiding the objections — not that I 
consider them relevant — alleged against the moral argu- 
ment, so-called. We are not looking at the constitution 
of our moral nature and deducing from its characteristics 
that God must possess the same. We are doing that 
which is far more in harmony with the peculiarities of the 
metaphysical processes of our time. The proof of the 
Being of God we have found in the phenomena of the 
universe rising up before us and crying out, refusing to 
be satisfied till we assigned to them a first cause in His 
Own eternal Existence. From the order and design 
which are evident in every part of nature we have in- 
ferred that the law and purpose which they display de- 
clare that He from whom they emanate is intelligent and 
free. And now looking at the facts of our moral life, 
merely as part, although confessedly the highest and 
most glorious part of the system of nature, we once more 
make a deduction and say that the Author of that law 
of perfection, and of that conscience which may at once 
be fascinated by its beauty and tremble at its menace 
must be Himself both righteous and good. *^For it is 
inconceivable,'' says Professor Diman, '^ that the Supreme 
Being should not Himself be in harmony with what is 
highest and most perfect. The laws which we can only 
conceive of as universal and unchangeable, must be the 
laws of His own being.*' ^ 

Before entering upon the question of moral sanctions 
which will compel us to take issue with all but intuitional 

1 " Theis. Arg.," p., 250, 



Conscience and Will 93 

ethics I should like to convince you that in picturing to 
you the facts of our moral consciousness principally in 
the words of great metaphysicians I have truly and fully 
represented this side of our nature as it really is. It is, 
as you well know, the office of poetry and the novel to 
hold the mirror up to life. And while we might take 
passages at will from any of the great dramatic writers, 
from ^schylus to Tennyson, there is one who over- 
tops them all; for in all his writings we recognize 
the wonderful truth of his own aphorism — ''one touch 
of nature makes the whole world kin.'* On that night 
when Richard III, after a life made up, almost, of a series 
of unspeakable crimes, rested under the grateful weight 
of the crown, which was at once the motive and the 
goal of them all, and looked forward on the morrow to 
the utter overthrow of those ^vho by his baseness had 
been driven to take arms against him, Shakespeare hears 
him hold this colloquy with himself: 

" O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me ! 
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight. 
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. 
What do I fear ? Myself? There's none else by : 
Richard loves Richard ; that is, I am I : 
Is there a murtherer here ? No. Yes ; I am : 
Then fly, — what, from myself ? Great reason ; Why ? 
Lest I revenge. What! Myself upon myself ? 
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore ? for any good 
That I myself have done unto myself? 
Oh, no ; alas I rather hate myself 
For hateful deeds committed by myself. 
I am a villain. Yet I lie, I am not. 



94 Religion for the Time 

Fool, of thyself speak well : Fool, do not flatter. 
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, 
And every tongue brings in a several tale, 
And every tale condemns me for a villain. 
Perjury, perjury in the highest degree; 
Murther, stern murther, in the direst degree ; 
All several sins, all used in each degree, 
Throng to the bar, crying all, — Guilty ! guilty." ^ 

Now the Shakespearian student will remember tliat the 
poet does simply put into words what the chroniclers of 
the time place before us as the actual sentiments of the 
King as his life of wickedness passed in review before 
him. And what I trust is clear to you is that, in this 
utterance of unrelieved remorse, our human nature 
speaks out, stripped of all disguises, untrammeled by the 
shackles of any theory whatsoever, and that in it we 
hear the voice of our innermost being crying out, as 
by a clarion, in notes which awaken a responsive chord in 
every human breast. It is, therefore, the testimony of 
the heart, or reason of humanity rendering its witness, to 
absolute, moral truth. And if we analyze Richard's 
judgment of himself I think we shall find that it contains 
at least these three elements. First : there is a law out- 
side of himself, which he was bound to observe, but has 
broken. Secondly : that though he has successfully 
hidden many of his crimes, and so deceived his fellows, 
nevertheless this law has to do v»^ith the thoughts and 
intents of his heart and he cannot exonerate himself. 
And once more, that though he expects on the morrow to 

1 King Richard III, Act V, Scene 3. 



Conscience and Will 95 

vanquish all his foes, and reign triumphant On England's 
throne, he can never escape from the penalties of this 
law which hang suspended over his devoted head, simply 
awaiting the predestined hour when they should fall and 
crush him with their terrible weight of condign punish- 
ment. He does not regard himself as unfortunate, his 
pain is not caused by the arrest of his career in its on- 
ward march to supremacy. But the pang which wrings 
his soul is that he is ^'guilty, guilty y 

If this be true, it follows as the night the day, that the 
science of ethics must lay its basis in the fundamental 
moral intuitions. No system which is not founded on that 
rock is entided to the name of ethics. Ethics is the 
science of the ought. Its sphere is the realm of obliga- 
tion. What I am responsible for doing, that I ought to 
do. UtiHtarianism is an altogether different thing. To 
speak of utilitarian ethics is to use a misnomer. It 
should never be done, except, perhaps, as an act of 
courtesy to a controversial opponent. 

In order to see this we may be excused if we decline 
to trail you through the mud of the mere eudaemonists 
from Epicurus to Hobbes, and even Bentham. These 
have all been turned out of court, I may say, by the 
counsel for the defendant. And neither shall I waste 
your time with evolutional treatises on ethics so called — 
I will not so call them, for I have told you that I do not 
believe them to be ethics at all — of the last ten or fifteen 
years. I have looked into them and seen that they make 
no real contribution to the subject. We shall content 
ourselves with a brief examination of the two who are re- 



96 Religion for the Time 

sponsible for all that is really characteristic of monistic 
thought on the subject, during the last half century. 

Mr. John Stuart Mill, taking up the subject where 
Bentham had left it, felt the difficulty of the latter' s sys- 
tem as keenly as any one. It was this. If pleasure and 
utility are the only motives to conduct how shall we 
secure that sacrifice of individual pleasure to the well- 
being and happiness of the whole body which is plainly 
necessary ? You must remember that he had renounced 
intuition and resolutely sought the grounds of morals in 
sensation and considerations of advantage. He tells us 
that it is accomplished in this way. Men have found by 
long and varied experience that when they seek their in- 
dividual ends, to the detriment of society at large, they 
have gotten themselves into serious difficulty, and thus 
defeated their own purpose. In time they have come, 
by the law of association of ideas, to identify their inter- 
ests with those of the community of which they are mem- 
bers ; and thus starting from a standpoint of pure self- 
ishness they have been, by the mere action of events, 
advanced to the high platform of altruism. We do not 
pause to ask whether this is an accurate statement of the 
case, nor even how much real altruism has been pro- 
duced. We simply content ourselves with pointing out, 
that the greatest mind of the nineteenth century on the 
skeptical side, when proposing a moral sanction, which 
he saw clearly must form part of a system of ethics if it 
was to be worthy of the name, finds it in a deception. 
You think you ought to do thus and so because it is 
right. But in accurate language there is no right and no 



Conscience and Will 97 

wrong. Some actions are beneficial and expedient, some 
are hurtful and unwise. And the only reason why you 
feel a sense of obligation to do the one and leave the 
other undone is that when you have tried to grasp more 
pleasure than was your share, society, by the operation of 
that nemesis by which it protects its members, has visited 
upon you such swift and painful correction as will in 
future make you respect the interests of others. These 
impressions produced, from time to time, at periods of 
your wrong-doing, by a law of the mind at length be- 
come cumulative; and you find yourself at last in the 
condition in which you feel responsible for promoting 
your neighbors' happiness and interest. You are not 
really. Really there is no such thing as responsibility. 
But you have been hoodwinked by a psychological de- 
lusion into believing that there is. Now suppose any 
individual should find this out, and any clever person 
ought to be able to very quickly, for it lies naked and 
open to the eyes of all men. And suppose, having found 
out that he was bright enough to discover how egregiously 
he had been humbugged, he advanced one step further, 
and concluded that he was shrewd enough to overlook 
his fellow's interest in his greed to secure his own, and 
at the same time avoid the chastisement which his ao:- 
grieved brothers had in store for such offenders — what 
could Mr. Mill say to such a man to lead him to mend his 
ways ? Nothing, absolutely nothing ! If he were really 
consistent with his own teachings — which thank God he 
was not — he could do nothing but applaud the clever 
rascal. On such principles there is but one command- 



98 Religion for the Time 

ment possible. It is very different from any God has 
given. I have heard it called the eleventh. It is — thou 
shalt not be found out. 

Just as Mr. Mill was keenly alive to the defects in the 
system of Bentham, and indeed of those of all his pred- 
ecessors, in the effort to find the basis of our moral appre- 
hensions in sensations pleasant or painful, so Mr. Herbert 
Spencer was not slow to see that Mill's, when subjected 
to a critical examination, broke down, as we have just 
seen. He therefore placed before himself the arduous, 
but fascinating task of succeeding where all others, for 
twenty-five hundred years, had failed. He had a great 
advantage and he seized upon it with avidity. The spell 
of development theories was at its height, and held 
three-fourths of the thinking world in its silken leash. 
Under this attractive garb Spencer gave his Data of 
Ethics to the world. Briefly these are the salient fea- 
tures. Selfishness is the only possible motive. But the 
individual must not be so grasping as to encounter the 
opposition and wrath of others, who also are seeking 
their own advantage with all possible zest, and who 
would be likely to resent an infringement of their privi- 
leges with reprisals which would bring to the aggressor 
sensations the opposite of peace and contentment. Those 
persons, in ages long gone by, who possessed the tact 
and prudence to perceive the exact amount of happiness 
which their associates could be induced or coerced into 
according to them, and were able to restrain uprising de- 
sires which cried out for more, were the fittest ; and the 
fittest survived. In the natural course of events they 



Conscience and Will gg 

transmitted to their progeny this same cool and calculat- 
ing pursuit of pleasure, and generation after generation 
the trait improved and grew more self-controlled, and 
self-contained. Besides this the social relations of man 
as he first approximated to civilization and then advanced 
in it, became more and more complex and interwoven 
till, as in our day, individual interests touch each other 
at innumerable points, like the threads in a tangled skein. 
And so it has come about that the interests of the individ- 
ual are identical with those of society as a whole, and 
selfishness, under the guidance of that arch magician 
evolution, has been transformed and stands before us 
to-day the beautiful goddess Altruism, before whom so 
many, who had quite forgotten how to worship, are 
again persuaded to bow down and pay their devotions at 
her shrine. 

Having answered Mr. Mill at length, it seems as if a 
few sentences would be sufficient to show that this latest 
attempt was, at least, not more successful. In the first 
place even granting that morals were brought about, or, 
at least, improved by some such process, what is to be 
done in the thousand and one instances which occur 
even in the lives of the most highly developed, in which 
the desires, nay imperious passions, of the individual 
rise up and clamor for a satisfaction which would bring 
disaster upon others ? It will not help the matter to say 
that the calm and prudent man will restrain such violent 
influxes of emotion. On the contrary he is just the man 
who can best afford to indulge them to the full. He 
knows how to cover up his tracks, to avoid the deadly 

iLofC. 



lOO Religion for the Time 

shaft of the avenger, and I need hardly say that the tears 
of the widow and the orphan are little likely to disturb 
his rest. You remember that the Epicureans, in the old 
days, understood this perfectly, and recommended the 
pursuit of pleasure on precisely these lines, and for the 
obvious reason that only thus could it be enjoyed to the 
very limit of satiety. 

This opens the way for us to see the radical defect, 
which we have said adheres to every phase of sensational 
morals, and from which Mr. Spencer's is no more free 
than any one's else. When an alternative between right 
and wrong is presented to any normal member of our 
race it is expressed in his consciousness in the terms, 
*^thou shalt," and *^thou shalt not." No amount of 
development, which by the very meaning of the word, 
simply brings out what was nascent or dormant, can 
account for this. Pleasure and pain may tell us what is 
wise, what will conduce to our happiness and well-being. 
They never can tell us what w^e micst do^ even if it cause 
us the greatest pain ; what we are under obligation to do, 
let the result be even the wreck of our own happiness. 
It is the Categorical Imperative which is the essence of 
our moral apprehension. This evolution can give no ac- 
count of whatsoever, and Mr. Spencer falls irretrievably 
into the abyss, which has yawned to receive all writers 
on ethics, who did not perceive that man lived under a 
law outside of himself and higher than himself. 

If then the effort to find, while rejecting theism, a 
sanction for morals, which is indeed the only thing worth 
looking for in the whole realm of ethical investigation, is 



Conscience and Will loi 

a predestined failure in the sphere of philosophy, or pure 
thought, we should not look with much expectation for 
good results in the practical world. Still, as men who 
have obtained the ear of many have had great confi- 
dence in their schemes for the advancement of mankind 
by what they were pleased to term independent morality, 
I suppose they ought to receive consideration. Mr. 
Harrison and the Positivists generally have found the 
motive to a moral life in humanity at large. This or 
that individual may not excite our enthusiasm, but the 
great race of mankind, with its magnificent possibilities, 
cannot fail to. And, then, when we consider the in- 
fluence that we may exert on future generations by the 
ever-expanding circle of the beneficent action of our life, 
as well as the uplifting agency of the traits we shall trans- 
mit to our descendants, the will is fired with a resolution 
which, shall make it impregnable by all assaults which 
urge it to seek the theatre of its action on a lower plane. 
We would not even seem to belittle the force of so 
grand a conception to influence conduct. But what we 
must say is that, however potent it may be as an an- 
cillary aid, it is, by itself, incapable of supporting the 
will in its performance of difficult duty. And, indeed, 
it is hardly necessary for us to say this, for Mr. Huxley 
has said so much more, and said it with so much more 
emphasis than we should like to use. '* I know of no 
study so unutterably saddening,*' this is the language in 
which he pays his respects to Mr. Harrison, '*as that of 
the evolution of humanity as it is set forth in the annals 
of history; . . . [and] when the positivists order 



102 Religion for the Time 

men to worship humanity — that is to say, to adore the 
generalized conception of men, as they ever have been, 
and probably ever will be — I must reply that I could 
just as soon bow down and worship the generalized con- 
ception of a * wilderness of apes.' *' ^ 

But when Mr. Huxley is guilty of the indiscretion of ■ 
stating what in his opinion is to be the strong prop which 
shall brace the will of the individual, which in the aggre- 
gate he finds so despicable, is he really any more felici- 
tous than his positivist opponents? He draws inspiration, 
for duty done against the grain, from the consideration 
that, though of little account ourselves, we are part of 
that great universe which reaches out into and fills all 
space. All its beauties, all its wonders, all its harmonies, 
all the magnificent results which it is gradually but surely 
achieving reflect their splendor on man ; and it is there- 
fore inconsistent with this exalted character that he should 
stoop to that which is intrinsically low. 

Now it must be remembered that these are practical 
systems. We have seen that in the realm of pure ethics 
it must be admitted that a sanction must be despaired of 
apart from the Being and Will of God. We may there- 
fore ask, nay I do ask you as sane men, looking at the 
matter from a mere standpoint of common sense, and in 
the light of that plain experience which comes to us all 
in our battle with the world, do you believe that the one 
consideration, or the other, is going to nerve a man to 
resistance when his nature is burning with the fires of 

1 Quoted by Mallock, Fortnightly , April, 1889. 



Conscience and Will 103 

fierce temptation? Let us take an example so as to be 
sure that we do entire justice to the view. Suppose a 
merchant in this city with large liabilities. The market 
has gone against him. He is in imminent danger of fail- 
ing. He can save himself by one dishonest measure. 
Here are the alternatives which present themselves to his 
mind. On the one hand the failure of his life-work. He 
can never hope to recover himself. The entire change 
of living that must come to wife and family. That boy, 
so full of promise, preparing himself for a bright career, 
must have every hope blasted, and in some uncongenial 
work grind out a bare subsistence. That daughter per- 
fecting herself in some brilliant accomplishment must 
renounce it and give herself to menial toil. And then on 
the other hand there is stooping to an act the like of 
which he never did, never thought it possible that he 
could do. But no one will discover his turpitude, and 
all this disaster will be averted. I have not chosen the 
illustration because I feel that it represents the most 
difficult form of temptation to resist. I believe that 
there are others much more so. Still it is a condition 
which has confronted many business men, and may stare 
many another in the face before this year is over. Now 
when the strength of this temptation is upon him, when 
ignominy, ruin, and the sufferings of those dearest to him, 
loom up in vivid colors before his imagination do you 
candidly think that he will be able to accept it all, 
rather than violate his conscience, because he reflects 
that if he does so the race of mankind ten thousand 
years hence will be somewhat better ? Would he not be 



104 Religion for the Time 

entitled to some consideration if he felt that his duty 
lay not quite so far off; that the needs of wife and 
children now, in this present exigency, were paramount ? 
But suppose he pins his faith to Huxley, and contem- 
plates the stars in their courses and the stately march of 
the planets. Will his association with all this grandeur 
and magnificence give him strength to follow what he 
knows to be a mere sentiment at so tremendous a cost ? 
No man in his senses thinks so ! And yet, my brothers, 
I doubt not that you have known cases where men have 
done this very thing, and have gone home to families 
beggared and houseless, and been applauded by wife and 
children, glad to bear any reverse, rather than that a stain 
should rest on the fair name of him whom they warmly 
loved, because they could say, 

** I could not love thee half so much loved I not honor more." 

But that same chivalrous regard for integrity is baseless, 
unless based deep in the Heart of God. 

Mr. Goldwin Smith, whom I refer to not because I think 
his book possesses intrinsic merit, but because it voices 
a large section of the better class of Agnosticism of the 
present day, sees as clearly as any one that duty, obliga- 
tion, responsibility are meaningless terms when separated 
from the idea of God. He is not without apprehension 
for the result when people at large discover that their 
morals can no longer find that support. Still he is hope- 
ful, and on a ground which, as it is the only one pos- 
sible, it will at least be interesting to glance at. *' It is 
natural to fear that unless a substitute for religion can, 



Conscience and Will 105 

within a measurable time, be found, a period of some 
moral confusion will ensue. . . . Society will not 
fall to pieces. It will be held together by the necessity 
of labor, of order, of mutual help and forbearance, by the 
domestic and social affections, by opinion, by the law 
and the police. It has, ifi fact, been held together, after 
a certain fashion, in China by these forces with little aid 
from religion. But it does not follow that, pending the 
reparation of the basis, society may not undergo a bad 
quarter of an hour, especially if, in the absence of 
spiritual aims and of any hopes beyond this world, a 
passionate thirst for pleasure, and for the means of ob- 
taining it, should prevail.'' ^ 

We can only say that society under these conditions 
did go to pieces under former civilizations, notably 
Greece and Rome ; that we have neither the race nor 
the civilization of China, and do not want them ; that if 
our people did not acquire a passionate thirst for pleasure 
and the means of obtaining it we would not be able to 
say in what channel their energies would be directed, and 
if society were held together by so flimsy a bond the bad 
quarter of an hour might be considerably extended ; and 
we should sympathize with the London citizen when told 
of the death of Henry IV. ^^111 news by'r lady; 
. . . I fear, I fear 'twill prove a giddy world." ^ 

For, however many privileges a man may demand 
for himself, he insists that those of his neighbor shall be 
restricted. One of the phrases with which recent sen- 

1" Guesses at Riddle of Existence," pp. 196-7. 
2 Richard III, Act II, Scene 3. 



io6 Religion for the Time 

sational, moral speculation has made us familiar is that 
every man proceeds upon the line of least resistance. It 
is difficult to permit the phrase to pass unnoticed. For 
what man is there, who is leading a decent life, who does 
not know that for years he has been pursuing the path 
where the greatest resistance had to be offered at every 
step ; and that if he had intermitted his determined 
opposition for an hour he would have found himself sunk, 
by the forces against which he has all along been con- 
tending, into the mire of vice and dishonor ? 

But suppose a man has theoretically convinced 
himself that there is no right and no wrong, and accord- 
ingly asserts for himself the liberty to take very consid- 
erable license with what is recognized as moral law. And 
there can be no doubt that many do. Suppose, then, 
the tables changed, and he becomes the sufferer from the 
action of another who makes a similar claim for himself. 
The man's fortune, for example, was left by his father, 
to this like-minded individual, as trustee. The heir 
finds that the trustee has embezzled the funds and left 
him penniless. A representative of a certain school 
comes to him and says in behalf of the thief, ^' Poor fellow, 
he could not help it ! He came into the world with an 
heredity, and lived in an environment which compelled 
him to appropriate your fortune. Treat him kindly, and 
get him into a sanitarium, where he will have all the 
luxuries, and be able to indulge all the tastes to which 
the expenditure of your money has rendered him accus- 
tomed.*' I fear his philosophy will desert him, and he 
will burst forth, perhaps in language hardly fitting to this 



Conscience and Will 107 

place, to say — ^^Poor fellow! He is a scoundrel! 
Every instinct of my being cries out for justice on him, 
and I shall do everything in my power to see that he 
suffers the extreme penalty of the law.*' And what view 
does the law take? It regards the individual as a crim- 
inal, responsible for his defalcation, and to be punished 
for his offense; and the more severely as the facts show 
that he had opportunities to know its heinousness and 
was aware of the privation it would entail upon the man 
he robbed. And thus we see that while it may sound all 
very grand to hear a man in the lecture room say that 
the notions of right and wrong are antiquated and must 
be abandoned, every man knows in heart that it is a lie, 
that when the evil presses upon him he must act on the 
contrary; and that society would quickly develop so 
many thugs and plug-uglies as to destroy it, could the 
law be converted to this view. And Aristides, the first 
of the Christian Apologists, was not least acute in his 
argument with the heathen, when he called their atten- 
tion to the fact that the Greeks found it necessary to 
make laws which condemned their gods.^ 

You have observed, all along, in our discussion of con- 
science that the very ground-work of responsibility, which 
all its phenomena demand, is the freedom of the will. 
We do not mean by this that the liberty of the volitional 
element in man is of such a character as to enable him 
to achieve any feat that his imagination may cause his 
mind to picture; and neither do we mean that that 

1 " Ante-Nic. Fathers/' ix, 275. 



i68 Religion for the Time 

liberty is not restrained by certain barriers. When, for 
example, the vital forces have reached their term mere 
willing cannot add a moment to the patient's life. Nor 
are the lines which mark the boundaries of human free- 
dom altogether physical. They are moral as well. A 
man who has for years led a dissolute life can no more by 
a mere resolution transform himself into ^^such an one as 
Paul *' or Isaiah than the fairies of old could really accom- 
plish the wonders they are said to have wrought by sim- 
ply uttering the talismanic formula — '* Presto ! change." 
Mary of Magdala may weep, but she must watch long at 
the cross and the tomb before she can hope to attain to 
sainthood. 

When, therefore, we say that the will is free we do not 
mean that it can perform impossibilities. We do mean 
that it possesses within its own sphere, not outside of it, 
a power of choice. And we are willing to rest the truth 
of this position upon the universal, unsophisticated judg- 
ment of mankind ; which is, you know, reason in the 
sense in which we use that term throughout these con- 
ferences. Yesterday you had the alternative of a base 
and a beneficent action placed in startling contrast before 
you. You chose to do the kind and beautiful deed. 
Perhaps your will trembled undecided in the balance for 
a considerable time. The evil appealed strongly to you, 
it held up before your longing nature a prize which 
offered you very great gratification. Finally, however, 
you turned away from the desired object of evil, and, by 
a free determination, bent your energies on the virtuous 
course with glad self-sacrifice. As you look back upon 



Conscience and Will 109 

the scene you know that you might have done the other. 
Perhaps you wonder why you did not. It may be even 
that you feel that, if the same opportunities are offered 
you to-morrow, you will decide in favor of the other 
course. But, at whatever stage of the proceeding, 
whether while the transaction is under consideration, or 
at the moment of action, or afterwards when you are 
passing it in review, you can at no time, and in no manner, 
persuade yourself that you did not exercise over your 
conduct a choice, which made the act your own act, and 
that it might have been, and would have been, different, 
or the opposite, if you had so determined. This is what 
we understand by free will. This it is which renders 
man an agent and responsible. 

Having taken our ground so strongly we may give full 
scope to desires, motives, the solidarity of the race, in- 
fluences of environment and heredity, and in doing so 
feel confident that, while we give their proper place to all 
related aspects of truth we do not imperil the impregna- 
bility of the fortress which it is necessary for us to occupy. 

What Dr. McCosh has said in reference to motives 
seems to be sufficient to dispose of the entire array of 
objections; for they can, in any event, be nothing but 
influences, and, as far as they act upon the will at all, 
must do so because they rise up and appear in the capac- 
ity of motives. He asks, *^Is this choice of mine de- 
termined by causes acting above the will and independent 
of the will? I reply that there is no proof that it is so. 
It is often said that the will is swayed by motives ; in 
fact by the strongest motive. But the language is am- 



no Religion for the Time 

biguous. It may be a mere truism, that what sways the 
will does sway the will, for by motive is simply meant 
what sways the will. Or it may mean what is not proven, 
what I believe not to be true. By motive may be meant 
a power or powers out of the will acting independently 
of it. I hold that in all motive there is a concurrence, 
or rather a consent of the will. Till this is given there 
can scarcely be said to be a motive ; there is simply in- 
centive or temptation. The man, it is said, was swayed 
by the love of money in doing a dishonest act, and it is 
affirmed that the love of money was the motive. But 
over many the love of money has no power, or no such 
power. The power is given to it as a motive by the will, 
by a long succession of acts, it may be creating an ap- 
petence, and, above all, by a present act, clinging to the 
money.*' * 

There can be no question that, just as we saw in the 
inorganic world the law of development was from the 
lower to the higher, from the simpler to the more com- 
plex ; so also, in the moral sphere, we observe a gradual, 
but nevertheless a continual evolution. The spirit 
of man climbing, as it were, the mountain ranges 
of lofty ethical ideals. Now some sublime soul has 
reached the summit of a peak from which he has looked 
forth upon a scene of loveliness never before beheld by 
man. He has not been content to sit there enraptured 
by the beauties upon which he was permitted to gaze ; 
but has beckoned to his brothers, who too are toiling up 

1 " Psychology Mot. Pow.,*' p. 259. 



Conscience tod Will 111 

the steep and rocky hillsides, and encouraged them, by 
the enthusiasm which lit up his countenance and lent 
poetry to his description of the fair country which from 
his point of vantage stretched out before him, to hasten 
their weary steps and nerve their flagging energies that 
they too might rise and sit down beside him. To him 
whose vision is limited to a narrow area or a brief period 
our picture may seem a mere exaggeration of the pulpit, 
or a chimera of the fancy. But let one look over the 
face of the world and contemplate the mighty march of 
civilization, and the most reluctant will be compelled to 
recognize the moral progress of mankind. We shall not 
detain you with details. The reflections naturally sug- 
gested by the close of one century and our entrance upon 
another have led many to take stock of the contributions 
of only an hundred years to the ethical advance to which 
every preceding period of equal duration lent its aid. 
We may say, however, that in the recognition of the 
single fact of the Brotherhood of man immense strides 
have been taken. The civilized world is to-day a prac- 
tical unit as far as its commercial interests at least are 
concerned ; and it has just issued an ultimatum, which 
means that a vast territory and resources yet unknown 
shall be blessed by participation in all the advantages 
that it has by incredible toil obtained for itself, and in 
turn yield up its treasures for the good of all ; and the 
demand has been acquiesced in. It is probable that in 
the future nations will fight little, will reason and arbi- 
trate. And while we have many social problems for 
which we do not seem to have begun to find the solu- 



112 Religion for the Time 

tion, this much may certainly be said — the wage-earner 
has comforts and advantages to-day the Hke of which 
were never within his grasp before since the world began. 
Here then is progress. No one can fail to see it. And 
it means that the purpose of the moral evolution of man- 
kind is towards the elevation, and with it the increase in 
happiness, of the race. Now we have seen that this 
purpose is not our purpose. It is that of the Author of 
the phenomena of moral life, and we cannot escape the 
inference that He is benevolent and good. 

It is just at this point, as you know, that the opponent 
of theism advances his battalions with greatest promise 
of victory. Just as in the natural world alleged defects, 
such as organs supposed to be useless, and rudiments of 
organs which are certainly so, have been appealed to as 
invalidating the argument of design and the wisdom of 
the Maker of the universe, so the dark facts of physical 
and moral life are advanced as impugning His holiness 
and love. If God is really what you ask us to believe, 
is the form in which the objection is presented, why is 
the world a scene of contest ? Why in the struggle for 
existence is there so much and such excruciating torture 
and pain, only to be capped and crowned with the un- 
speakable agonies of death? Why, above all, does an 
holy God permit the even more bitter woes of moral evil, 
by which life, even in childhood, has a pall cast over it 
which blights every joy, and blasts every hope which 
later and more fortunate years may hold out? How 
can you believe in a good God, who is the moral 
Governor of the world, and face the revelations which 



Conscience and Will 113 

the last few months have brought to hght m this great 
city? 

Let it then be fully understood that the Christian does 
not blink these facts, and neither does he attempt to 
belittle them. They are appalling ! I doubt if there is 
a Christian on the earth who has not, at times, felt the 
temptation which they offer to a serene and sunny faith. 
Exclusive consideration of them has clouded the mind 
with melancholy in all ages of the world. Those of you 
who have read Mr. Edwin Arnold's exquisite poem, in 
which he traces, in the mind of Buddha, the develop- 
ment of the religion w^hich bears his name, will remem- 
ber that it was determined by the woe and wickedness, 
which for the first time came under the prince's observa- 
tion, when, as he approached maturity, he drove out 
am.ong his subjects that he might prepare himself to rule 
them kindly and well. The blow was too great for his 
sensitive nature. If that was life, life appeared to be an 
evil. The reward he conceived, to be presented in the 
world to come, was Nirvana — cessation of personal ex- 
istence, absorption into the sum of all. So it would be 
easy from the literature of every age and nation to show 
that the pains and evils of life have tinged^ with a 
sombre hue, the most briUiant creations of genius. But 
it was reserved for the latter half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury to justify what had formerly been the sighing of 
aching hearts, in a scientific and reasoned system. 
Schopenhauer was the inventor and Hartman the per- 
fecter of philosophical Pessimism. 

According to this system, you know, for I must give it 



114 Religion for the Time 

a mere glance, all the phenomena of the world, organic 
or inorganic, are the result of unconscious intelligence 
and will. In life they emerge into consciousness, and the 
degree of it increases, as it rises in the scale, till it at- 
tains a maximum in man. As it is the nature of will to 
be always striving, ever reaching out after something 
new, it follows that the life of man must always be rest- 
less and unhappy. No sooner has he been able to gratify 
one want, than an hundred present themselves and de- 
mand acquisition; and indeed all his efforts to obtain 
satisfaction are rendered worse than nugatory, because 
every development which they achieve simply opens up 
a new vista of needs ; and even the imagination is 
paralyzed as it endeavors to picture the avenues of labor 
which the will marks out for human effort. And so life 
is one continual misery, the pangs of which become more 
and more acute as the individual becomes more highly 
developed and capable. Everything, therefore, that has 
been regarded as mitigating the evils of life has, in re- 
ality, tended to increase its woe. Conscious life, there- 
fore, is the supreme evil, and the only hope of good lies in 
its extinction. Hartman justifies voluntary continuance 
in life, on the part of enlightened men, only in order 
that by their influence they may prepare the race for the 
one universal suicide. 

As a philosophic system Pessimism has many merits, 
which render it superior to Agnosticism, which was its 
precursor, and, I should be willing to say, its father. 
That it should have followed so soon upon the heels of 
the system, which said it was content with no solution of 



Conscience and Will 115 

the problems of the world and life is interesting as illus- 
trating one of the most prominent contentions of these 
conferences, namely ; that the human mind must ask the 
reason why. It is so constituted that it cannot but do 
so. I think also that Pessimism is useful in calling at- 
tention to the ultimate and logical goal of all thought 
which would banish God from the world. Materialism 
can be made attractive when dressed in the seductive 
and meretricious garb in which it appears in the Rubaiyat 
for example. And Agnosticism may appear to satisfy a 
very gifted and cultivated mind, the occupations of 
which render it incapable of really considering the ques- 
tion. But when intellect is face to face with ontological 
facts, in the first place it must have an answer, and if it 
turn away from God, that answer must be that life is an 
untold evil. Unconsciousness, annihilation, reabsorption 
into the great, universal spirit, is the only good which 
man is heir to. Now, then, ^* I speak as to wise men,'* can 
you believe it ? And I am sure that I voice your reply, when 
I say, that you are made in such a way that you cannot. 
And if a philosophy without God requires of you the 
impossible, it also fails when you ask it to furnish you 
with a purpose. You may say that the answer to the 
question '' is life worth living ? '* is that it depends upon 
the liver. But the ability of the man so to live as to 
make it worth while, I make bold to affirm, depends 
upon his faith in God. This has been so remarkably 
and at the same time unconsciously illustrated by Mr. 
John Stuart Mill, in his own experience as recorded by 
himself, that I venture to transcribe his words. 



li6 Religion for the Time 

*' It was in the autumn of 1826 (aged twenty). I was 
in a dull state of nerves such as every one is occasionally 
liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable ex- 
citement ; one of those moods when what is pleasure at 
other times, becomes insipid or indifferent ; the state, I 
should think, in which converts to Methodism usually 
are, when smitten by their first 'conviction of sin.' 
In this state of mind it occurred to me to put the ques- 
tion directly to myself : * Suppose that all your objects 
in life were realized ; that all the changes in institutions 
and opinions which you are looking forward to could be 
completely effected at this very instant : would this be a 
great joy and happiness to you? ' And an irrepressible 
self-consciousness distinctly answered, ^ No ! * At this 
my heart sank within me : the whole foundation on which 
my life was constructed, fell down. All my happiness 
was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this 
end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could 
there ever again be any interest in the means ? I seemed 
to have nothing left to live for. 

"... For some months the cloud seemed to grow 
thicker and thicker. The lines in Coleridge's * Dejec- 
tion ' — I was not then acquainted with them — exactly 
describe my case : 

'* * A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, 
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, 
Which finds no natural outlet or relief 
In word, or sigh, or tear.' " ^ 

i"Autobiog.," pp. 133-4. 



Conscience and Will 117 

He proceeds to tell us that at the end of six months 
under the inspiration of a noble example and the deter- 
mination to cultivate his emotional nature his dejection 
was relieved, and finally in the delightful companionship 
of Mrs. Taylor wore away. But the fact which I wish 
to emphasize is that Mill never faced and answered the 
question which came to him, as it does at some time to 
all men. Suppose I could achieve all that I have set 
before me in the world, would it give me the joy and 
happiness which my very being compels me to crave? 
Would it be worth while? Mill found diversion and 
distraction, but could never obtain satisfaction for this 
crying want of his soul. 

I cannot but regard this as one of the most conspicu- 
ous instances of the influence of the will upon the re- 
ception or rejection of truth that has ever come under 
my notice. Here was a man, who, if any one ever did, 
tried always to be perfectly candid and fair. He saw 
perfectly well that if he could realize all his most enthu- 
siastic dreams for his life-work they would amount 
to a mere nothing. The revelation oppressed, appalled 
him. But for once he turned away, I am not aware that 
he ever did such a thing before or after, from a problem 
which squarely confronted him. He did not interrogate 
it, apparently did not try to find out its meaning. It 
was, unquestionably, the loving appeal of the Holy 
Ghost, perhaps the last, summoning His gifted child to 
consecrate those great powers of intellect and affection 
to the service of Almighty God. In turning away, 
mayhap, he discarded the last treasure of grace his soul 



1 18 Religion for the Time 

possessed, and sealed his final rejection. But had he 
followed the leading of that startling spiritual experience 
it would indeed have shown him where his sin lay. He 
would have been convicted of sin, and led to God. It 
throws a brilliant light upon the mental processes of what 
in recent years we have so often heard spoken of as the 
sincere skeptic ; and I think it justifies the profound ut- 
terance of Pascal, ** Will is one of the principal organs 
of belief; not that it forms belief, but because things are 
true or false, according to the side on which we look at 
them. The will, that is more pleased with the one than 
the other, hinders the mind from considering the quali- 
ties of those it dislikes to see ; and thus the mind, keep- 
ing pace with the will, fixes its attention upon the side 
that it likes, and thus it judges by what it sees in that.^ " 
It gives us pleasure to quote Matthew Arnold, who, 
with a faith none too clear, still when he came to think 
over the pure strong life of his father, finds it impossible 
to believe that it had become extinct. 

" O strong soul, by what shore 
Ferriest thou now ? For that force 
Surely, has not been left in vain ! 
Somewhere, surely, afar, 
In the sounding labor-house vast 
Of being, is practiced that strength, 
Jealous, beneficent, firm." * 

And then he proceeds to tell us that it is such lives 
which help the frailer members of our race in their trials 
and struggles. 

« 1 Thoughts," chap, iv, vii. « Rugby Chapel, 



Conscience and Will 119 



« See ! In the rocks of the world 
Marches the host of mankind, 
A feeble, wavering line. 
Where are they tending ? A God 
Marshaled them, gave them their goal. 
Ah, but the way is so long ! 



Ye fill up the gaps in our files. 
Strengthen the wavering line, 
Stablish, continue our march. 
On, to the bound of the waste. 
On, to the City of God/» i 



Rugby ChapeL 



V 

ORIGINAL SIN THE BRIDGE BY 
WHICH WE PASS FROM NAT- 
URAL TO REVEALED 
RELIGION 



CONFERENCE V 

ORIGINAL SIN THE BRIDGE BY WHICH WE PASS 
FROM NATURAL TO REVEALED RELIGION 

**Papa/' said the little boy in one of those character- 
istic outbursts which display the youthful thirst for 
knowledge, ** Papa, I hear people talking all the time 
about human nature, human nature. Papa, what is 
human nature? *' " Well, my son, as far as I have been 
able to make out, human nature is the excuse a man 
alleges when he has been making a beast of himself.'* 

I suppose the phenomena indicated by this reply are 
familiar to us all. I very well remember a lady, who 
was interested in a family in which I also was, telling me 
that, calling one day on the wife, she had related the 
following. Her husband who gambled away his money 
and never really provided for his wife and children had 
recently been more niggard than usual. Finding at sup- 
per one evening the steak not tender enough to be pleas- 
ing to his taste, he took his wife to task for the miserable 
fare she had prepared. She said, ^^But Jack, you know 
you told me the other day that I must spend less on the 
table, and so for this evening I bought the cheapest cut.*' 
** Well,** he rephed, ^* if it has to be as tough as this you 
must make the money go further, and buy the better 
quality.** And my friend's comment was, ** It was so like 

a man ! *' Was it? We should be inclined to say it was 

123 



124 Religion for the Time 

so like anything but a man. I suppose it was like what 
most men, in one way or another, with more or less 
frequency do ; but if we were to characterize the miser- 
able, bullying, fault-finding in the attitude of that hus- 
band to a wife, whose shoes he was never fit to tie, I fear 
we should be obliged to say that it was most tmmanlyf 
that it was despicable. 

And so we find ourselves confronted by a dilemma. 
We say that this or that is like ^ man, meaning that men 
often manifest the same, and at the same time our judg- 
ment is that it is as far removed from our real conception 
of a man as anything could possibly be. Here, then, is 
a paradox in our speech which can be accounted for only 
because it gives voice to an antinomy profound and deep- 
seated in our moral life. It is rooted and grounded 
in our being. It has haunted us, like a spectre, all the 
time that we were gazing upon, what would otherwise 
have appeared to us, the lovely countenance of con- 
science. But every moment or two it has raised up its 
hideous head to scare us by the deformity of its features. 
Man is living under a law, and for a purpose, both of 
which he perceives to be sublime and heavenly ; and yet 
his will refuses to obey the one or follow the other, even 
though he knows that ruin is the sure result of his ob- 
liquity. Can we obtain any light upon this evident con- 
tradiction in our moral life ? 

You are aware that, with development theories of 
morals, has come to us, also, what has assumed to be an 
explanation. We have been told that evolving from the 
beasts beneath us we have simply carried with us those 



Original Sin 125 

appetites and passions which were so useful, even neces- 
sary, in our brute ancestors, but inconvenient in the 
stage of progress we have attained. They are perfectly 
natural though, and we are, therefore, never to be sur- 
prised, and not even much perturbed when we see 
actions in others, and feel stirrings in ourselves, which 
forcibly remind us that we are descended from the 
ancient Simian stock. 

It seems to us that what we said in the last conference 
of the failure of development writers to account for the 
very essence of our ethical, perceptions, namely, the 
mandatory obligation under which we live, renders it 
unnecessary for us to waste your time with the con- 
sideration of this or that manifestation of it. If we 
know that Jack has killed the giant we need not puz- 
zle our wits to find out how under the sun he got the 
bean-stalk to grow high enough to enable him to do it. 
It may assist some people, who are determined to live 
like beasts, to silence their consciences, to reflect that their 
heredity makes it altogether natural that they should. 
But this is an entirely different thing from explaining to 
us why it is that "what I would that do I not," "but 
what I hate, that do I.'' 

Is the darkness which hangs over this terribly interest- 
ing aspect of our nature, impenetrable? Is there no 
possibility of our obtaining the light our spirits so ear- 
nestly crave ? 

I shall not pretend that we shall be rewarded by a ray, 
but hope that we may find the right direction in which 
to seek it, by reminding ourselves of some puzzling facts 



126 Religion for the Time 

that have presented themselves unbidden as we have 
pursued our way in these conferences. Annid all the 
evidences of design and purpose in the world we found 
some things like useless organs, rudiments of organs and 
monstrous growths which appeared to be inconsistent 
with them. Then there was physical pain, in its end- 
less varieties and exquisite throes, leading up to and end- 
ing in the king of terrors, death. These seem to give us 
pause when we feel most exuberant in our expressions of 
the benevolence which the universe leads us to attribute 
to its Author. And worst of all there is moral evil, not 
merely those dastardly acts which men exhibit daily in their 
struggle for existence, which, bad as they are, one could 
partly excuse on the ground of the heat and intensity of 
the contest, but those which to a man normally con- 
stituted seem acts of absolute insanity, forsaking avenues 
of satisfaction for those where, it would appear, not even 
the dregs of joy were to be obtained.^ All these things, 
you will remember, we saw last week, had led philos- 
ophy, divorced from God, to Pessimism — the doctrine 
that evil is so dominant that there is no escape from it, 
except to cease to be. 

Suppose now in our deepest perplexity we do what the 
scientific men have so often resorted to with the best re- 
sults. We will fall back on a working hypothesis, that is 
to say, we will conjecture that the truth may lie in a 
certain direction, and will confine our attention to that 

* Within the week four men (?) had been sentenced for drugging 
into unconsciousness and then assaulting Jennie Bosscheiter. 
The girl died. 



Original Sin I27 

class of facts, and see if in this manner we attain satis- 
faction. Well, our working hypothesis shall be that the 
world and man are both a partial wreck, and of the evils 
which stare at us with impudent gaze and defy us to see 
God's work in connection with them we will say *^an 
enemy hath done this." Perhaps an illustration will aid 
us in justifying the adoption of such a course. Suppose 
a man highly educated in the principles of mechanics, but 
who had never seen a locomotive or a train of cars, 
suddenly brought upon the scene of one of our great rail- 
road disasters. He would find the cars piled on top of 
each other, some of them broken all to pieces, some of 
them in comparative preservation, their contents, human 
or articles of commerce, scattered in all directions and 
in all conditions of dismemberment or soundness; and 
the engine broken, but still hissing with steam, lying at 
one side beneath a car or two. What conclusions do 
you think he would be able to draw from the scene of 
ruin which lay before him ? I think he would not be 
long in determining that the cars were vehicles of traffic. 
Some of them would have the goods still in them. It 
would be evident that what lay upon the ground had 
come from others. Some of the axles and wheels would 
remain in good condition ; and seeing that they exactly 
fitted to the track, which stretched away in both di- 
rections, he would without hesitation infer that their pur- 
pose was to bear the freight along its pathway. I think 
he would not be long in concluding that the engine fur- 
nished the motive power. And when he came to reflect 
more closely upon the phenomena he would be sure that 



128 Religion for the Time 

the cars were intended to go along one behind the other 
with the locomotive at their head. He would soon be 
satisfied that what caused the disorder was some ob- 
struction which brought the train to a violent halt. Its 
own momentum had been able to achieve the rest. 
What had caused ' the sudden cessation of motion might 
or might not be evident to him. But he would, at least, 
be certain that some force, coming into opposition with 
that by which the train was designed to convey its load, 
was responsible for the havoc which he saw. Similarly 
it seems to me that it is at least a good working hypothe- 
sis to assume that the difficulties which arise in the way 
of the theist as he pursues his joyous course in both the 
physical and moral sphere are the evidence of the opera- 
tion of an antagonistic force in collision with, and at 
some points temporarily victorious over, the Intellect and 
Will which we have seen so much to convince us is wise 
and good, of vast power and benevolence, planning and 
loving. We shall draw our facts from that source with 
which we are most familiar, and whence they are with 
most certainty obtained, from the life and characteristics 
of man himself; and, not to ask you to run the hazard 
of falling into innumerable mistakes which listening to 
me might entail, I shall present them through the lan- 
guage of one whom, perhaps, few would like to under- 
take to convict of error. 

** Greatness of Man. — We have such a grand idea of 
the soul of man, that we cannot endure to be despised 
by it, or even not to be esteemed by it ; and the whole 
felicity of men consists in this esteem. 



Original Sin 129 

*' The greatest baseness of man is his seeking for glory : 
but even this is the greatest indication of his excellence ; 
for, whatever possession he may have on earth, whatever 
health and essential comfort he may have, he is not sat- 
isfied without the esteem of men. He esteems the 
reason of man so great, that whatever advantage he may 
have on earth, if he is not also advantageously situated 
in the reason of man, he is not content. This is the 
most beautiful situation in the world ; nothing can turn 
him aside from this desire, and it is the most ineffaceable 
quality of man's heart. 

*^ And those who most despise men, and place them on 
a level with the brutes, still wish to be admired and be- 
lieved by them, and contradict themselves in their own 
sentiment, their nature, which is stronger than all, more 
forcibly convincing them of man's greatness than reason 
convinces them of his baseness. ' ' ^ 

On the other hand the great author of the Pensees is 
not less sensible of the littleness of humanity. He takes 
this means of setting it vividly before us. **The nature 
of self-love and of this human me is to love only self 
and to consider only self. But what will man do ? He 
knows not how to prevent this object that he loves from 
being full of defects and miseries : he wishes to be 
great and he sees himself small ; he wishes to be happy 
and sees himself miserable ; he wishes to be perfect and 
sees himself full of imperfections ; he wishes to be the 
object of the love and esteem of men, and he sees that 

1 Pascal, ♦* Thoughts," ii, iv. 



130 Religion for the Time 

his defects merit only their aversion and contempt. 
This embarrassment in which he finds himself produces 
in him the most unjust and most criminal passion that 
it is possible to imagine; for he conceives a mortal 
hatred of that truth which reproves him, and convinces 
him of his defects. He desires to annihilate it, and, 
not being able to destroy it in itself, he destroys it as far 
as he can in his own conscience and that of others : 
that is, he does his utmost to conceal his defects, both 
from others and himself, and cannot bear that they 
should be shown to him, or that they should be seen." ^ 

He proceeds to show us that the universal craving for 
amusement is, after all, nothing but a testimony to the 
intense unhappiness of man. He instances a king as 
being in the most favorable position. '* A king is sur- 
rounded by people who think only of diverting him, and 
hinder him from thinking on himself. For he is un- 
happy, king as he is, if he thinks on his own condition. 

^*This is all that men have been able to invent to 
make themselves happy. And those who philosophize 
upon the matter, and believe that the world is very 
irrational to spend a whole day in running after a hare 
that they would not have purchased, know but little of 
our nature. This hare would not secure us from the 
view of death and the miseries that turn us aside from it, 
but the chase does secure us from them. And thus when 
they are reproached for seeking with so much ardor 
what can give them no satisfaction, if they responded as 
they should do if they considered the matter well, that 

1 Pascal, " Thoughts," iii, viii. 



Original Sin 131 

they seek in this only a violent and impetuous occupa- 
tion which keeps them from thinking on themselves, and 
that in this they propose to themselves an attractive ob- 
ject which charms and attracts them with ardor, they 
would leave their adversaries without reply. But they 
do not respond thus, because they know not themselves ; 
they know not that it is only the chase, and not the 
taking of the game that they seek." ^ 

**Know, then,*' he proceeds, ^^ haughty man, what a 
paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, impotent 
reason ; be silent, imbecile nature ; learn that man infi- 
nitely surpasses man, and hear from your master your 
true condition which you are ignorant of. Listen to God. 

^* For, in fine, if man had never been corrupted, he 
would enjoy in his innocence both truth and happiness 
with assurance. And if man had never been more than 
a corrupted being, he would have no idea either of truth 
or of beatitude. But, unhappy as we are, and more 
than if there were no grandeur in our condition, we 
have an idea of happiness, and we cannot reach it ; we 
feel an image of the truth, and possess but falsehood ; 
incapable of absolute ignorance, and of certain knowl- 
edge, so manifest is it that we have been in a degree of 
perfection from which we are unfortunately fallen. . . . 

'* What then is this cry of avidity and impotency, ex- 
cept that there was formerly in man a true happiness, of 
which there remains to him now only a mark, a trace 
wholly void, which he vainly tries to fill with all that 

1 Pascal, " Thoughts,'* Chap. v. ii. To do justice to the thought 
the whole passage should be read. 



132 Religion for the Time 

surrounds him, seeking from things absent the succor 
which he cannot obtain from things present, but which 
are incapable of it, because this infinite abyss cannot be 
filled but by an infinite and immutable object, that is, 
but by God Himself. 

*^ He alone is man's true good ; and since man has 
left God it is a strange thing, that there is nothing in na- 
ture that has been able to fill His place. . . . And 
since he has lost the true good, everything may equally 
appear to him such, even his own destruction, although 
so contrary to God, reason, and nature combined.'* 
Those who have best sought ''have understood that the 
true good ought to be such, that all might possess it at 
once, without diminution and without envy, and that no 
one might lose it against his will. 

*' All men seek to be happy. . . . And yet, after 
the lapse of so many years, no one has ever reached, 
except by faith, this point upon which all keep their 
eyes continually fixed. 

''If man is not made for God, why is he happy only 
in God ? If man is made for God, why is he opposed 
to God ? 

" Man knows not in what rank to place himself. He 
is obviously astray, and fallen from his true place with- 
out being able to find it again. He seeks it everywhere 
with uneasiness, and without success in impenetrable 
darkness." ^ 

I have given you at such length, in the words of 
Pascal, the account of the opposing attributes of our 

1 Pascal, " Thoughts," Chap. x. 



Original Sin 133 

moral life and their explanation because they contain the 
first statement of them which came under my observa- 
tion and I still think them unsurpassed. If, then, man 
is a fallen being, if, particularly in the higher aspects of 
his nature, there are hard facts which puzzle the natural- 
ist and stultify the ethical thinker, but which at once are 
found soluble under the kindly touch of this hypothesis, 
then what we started with as a mere working hypothesis 
we are now entitled, on scientific principles, to adopt. 
Explanation of the facts is the final assurance that we 
have attained the truth. 

We have seen, in this course, that there is a God who 
has made all the world, and as its crown and ornament, 
the highest production of His creative power, has sum- 
moned man to take his place. We have seen that this 
wondrous Being of mighty intellect and boundless power, 
is also good and loving. And now lastly, we have seen 
that the enigma which utterly baffled science and caused 
the latest development of philosophy to blaspheme falls 
gracefully into its place in the ranks of knowledge under 
the genial illumination of that single truth — man is a 
fallen being. Is it so? Did He who has taken such 
care in the construction of a little piece of quartz, hidden 
deep away in the earth from the reach of any eye, that it 
can, when presented to the sun, divide the rays of light 
and give us their beauteous constituent colors, and so 
put us in the way of ascertaining the materials of which 
the great planets are made, which sweep away in their 
courses millions of miles from our earth ; has, I say, this 
great and loving Creator, who has taken such inconceiv- 



134 Religion for the Time 

able care throughout the inanimate world, lost a child ? 
Has the being whom He intended to be exalted to the 
position nearest His lost his high place and fallen to one 
at least greatly inferior, one of misery, where was de- 
light, of darkness where once beamed in the glorious sun 
of truth, of disorder and sin, where were harmony and 
holiness ? What will God do, my brethren ? You an- 
swer me before I can enunciate the words. He will reach 
down from His heavenly altitude and lift up and save 
that child. I am sure that you will heartily endorse these 
words of the great St. Athanasius, ^^ It was not worthy 
of the goodness of God that things made by Him should 
perish. . . . Therefore, the rational being becoming 
depraved, and such works as these being destroyed, what 
was it necessary that God, being good, should do? 
Should He let corruption prevail against them, and death 
subdue them? . . . For it were more fitting that 
they should not have come into existence, than that, 
being in existence, they should be uncared for, and 
perish; for, by want of care, weakness, and not good- 
ness, is rather argued of God, if, after having made. He 
winks at His work being corrupted. . . . For if 
He had not made him, no one would think about weak- 
ness ; but after He had made him, ... it would 
be most out of place that His work should perish ; and 
especially in the very sight of its Maker. Therefore it 
was necessary that God should not suffer man to fall into 
corruption, since that would be unbefitting and unworthy 
of the goodness of God.*' ^ If, then, God was going to 

1 De Incarnatione, 6. 



Original Sin 135 

save His lost and ruined child, the first step surely that 
He would take would necessarily be to inform the child 
of His intention, and to begin to instruct and train him 
for the improved condition to which he might now look 
forward and was destined one day to occupy. 

And so you see why I have called Original Sin the 
bridge by which we pass from Natural to Revealed Re- 
ligion. All our previous work has led us to its threshold. 
No matter what department we have surveyed, whether 
of external nature or of man, we have found reason to 
believe that a force adverse to the original intention of 
the Maker of all had gained an entrance and found a 
sphere of operation. In the world of nature there is 
abundant evidence of intellect and purpose and benefi- 
cence in its Maker ; but there is also much, not to lead 
us to repudiate this conclusion, but which we find hard 
to reconcile with it. In the life of man his very intellect 
often enables him to turn his eyes away from truth, and 
his will is frequently used to mock his conscience when 
it points him to the right. 

You will remember that the existence and movements 
of comets for a long time puzzled astronomers and led 
them to believe that here and in some other phenomena 
of the heavenly bodies they had discovered anomalies. 
But more patient investigation and more accurate thought 
have revealed that the real difficulty consisted in the 
partial and imperfect knowledge of the observer, and to- 
day the apparently erratic course of these wanderers 
through the skies is as well known, and can be as easily 
traced as can the majestic progress of Venus — ** the most 



136 Religion for the Time 

beautiful object in the heavens/' And the presumption 
is overpowering — such is the judgment of our more 
reliable scientists — that there is no such thing as irregu- 
larity, all is under the absolute sway of law, in the 
external world. If this be so does it not justify us in, at 
least, indulging the hope, that if we knew all the facts, 
we should be able to show that the intellectual and moral 
worlds were equally under the reign of law, and that the 
seeming exceptions would be seen to fall into line as the 
full and perfect light fell upon them ? 

Without professing to be in possession of this full and 
perfect light let us use the light which Revelation affords 
us, since we have won our right to claim it, and see if it 
does not, at least, relieve a great many difficulties. We 
begin by calling attention to the Biblical statement that 
in the creation of man there were two distinct processes.^ 
First : '* The Lord God formed man of the dust of the 
ground.*' If the doctrine of evolution should in the 
future be demonstrated, — I need hardly say it is not 
now — we should then know to a certainty the method 
which God pursued — perhaps with an unspecified inter- 
vention at the proper period to instill life — in the con- 
struction of our wonderful bodies. And the length of 
time which we know from geology to be included in one 
of those great creative days would seem to prepare us to 
accept this as the true explanation. But what we saw 
last week that no amount of development could achieve, 
nothing less than the accession of a new and higher 
power could, we are told, was brought about in this 

> Gen. 2:7. 



Original Sin 137 

manner. ''The Lord God breathed into his nostrils the 
breath of life, and man became a living soul." Our 
rational and moral nature, with its unique powers of 
intellect, affection and will is a direct gift from God 
Himself and constitutes, in us, His image, with which 
was bestowed the sublime, the ineffable possibility of ad- 
vancing to the divine likeness.^ What is the grandest 
endowment of man ? What is it that he most prizes, 
which exalts him to the loftiest place above the whole 
creation of God? Is it not his freedom? Is it not 
that volitional liberty which constitutes him an agent and 
responsible ? Now is it not a necessity that, if a free- 
will was to be given to a rational creature, that indi- 
vidual, in the process of education inherent in the con- 
dition, must undergo a probation. The object of a free- 
will under those circumstances would be the passage from 
the state of innocence, in which he came forth from the 
Creator's hand, to that of virtue. The very word virtue 
means that which we have put strength into. In other 
words if a will were created free it must from the 
necessity of the case be created in equilibrium ; which 
means that its liberty involved it in the obligation to 
determine on which side of the scale it would throw its 
weight. 

This, scripture tells us, is precisely the state of man in 
Paradise. And while the whole transaction occupies but 
a few verses — such is the wonderful condensation of the 
divine narrative — the careful reader will not be in- 

^ Gen. I : 26. ** The word rendered i??iage signifies outline, the 
likeness is the filling up of the outline." — Wordsworth, 



138 Religion for the Time 

sensible that the trial of our first parents was most fair 
and most searching ; and when they turned their backs 
upon the command of God they did so with the utmost 
deliberation, and their revolt extended to their entire 
nature — body, soul and spirit.^ I need not detail the 
results of man^s defection from God. They are evident 
in humanity. From having a nature without defects and 
which possessed the prerogative opportunity of going on 
unto perfection he now bore with him one which was 
vitiated, as the whole stream of history informs us. 

The next chapter in our tale is told in the following 
words : '* And Adam . . . begat a son in his own 
likeness, after his image." ^ He had marred and defaced 
God's image, in which his beatitude it was to be made, 
he no longer possessed it in its integrity.' Therefore he 
could not transmit it to his descendants. He handed on 
the nature with its powers still showing the magnificence 
which their divine origin implied, but all in disorder, 
constantly arrayed one against the other, in the exact 
condition in which they had been left when, by his free 
and deliberate act, he had by sin driven out the Holy 
Spirit, Whose inbreathing had given them existence, and 
Whose indwelling sustained them in harmony, and high 
normal action. And here you have the totally misunder- 
stood and almost uniformly maligned doctrine of Original 
Sin. No scientific man would have the slightest diffi- 

1 Gen. 3:6. « Gen. 5 : 2. 

3 He had not entirely lost it. Gen. 9:6; James 3:9. If he 
had there would have been nothing with which to begin a work of 
salvation. 



Original Sin 139 

culty in accepting it, I mean in itself considered. It is 
hard to see how any one famihar with the phenomena or 
doctrine of heredity can for a moment doubt it. For the 
absurdities and extravagances of the Continental Re- 
formers on the subject, and indeed on the whole doctrine 
of sin, we feel no responsibility. But the Catholic doc- 
trine has never been better expressed than in the ninth 
Article. '* Original sin standeth not in the following 
of Adam, (as the Pelagians do vainly talk) ; but is the 
fault and corruption of the nature of every man, that 
naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; 
whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, 
and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh 
lusteth always contrary to the Spirit.'* It seems as if Dr. 
Liddon's statement must be satisfactory to all thinking 
people. "People who reject the revealed doctrine of 
original sin transmitted, by the loss of grace, from our 
first parent to all his descendants, cannot deny the plain- 
est facts of human physiology ; they must either deny God's 
justice in the laws of nature, or admit it in the teaching 
of Revelation." ^ 

If then we accept the doctrine of Original Sin, which 
we found ourselves led up to by our previous psycholog- 
ical study, it seems as if the difficulties of both man's 
thought and morals were to a great extent, at least, 
removed. But it will be said this is after all a mere drop 
in the great ocean of perplexity that everywhere threatens 
to engulf us in the physical world. There is pain and 
death ; besides the evident policy of nature of advancing 

1 "Advent in St. Paul's," I., p. So. 



140 Religion for the Time 

all its ends by these agencies. Cruelty is the very in- 
strument of progress in the whole animal world. Now 
the brutes have not a moral nature in the sense in which 
it is attributed to man, and therefore are not capable of sin. 
Besides that it is evident that death was in the world long 
before man. The explanation advanced seems to halt, 
and unless it receives assistance quickly will irretrievably 
break down. Very well let Holy Scripture at once rush 
to its aid. 

It is very clearly the intention of the sacred writer to 
show a close connection between the interests and the 
fate of the world animate and inanimate, and those of man. 
<* Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the 
fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth 
upon the earth.'* ^ A very great disaster, also, man is 
represented as having brought upon the inorganic world 
by his sin. ^^ Because thou hast . . . eaten of the 
tree of which I commanded thee, saying, thou shall not 
eat of it : cursed is the ground for thy sake ; in sorrow 
shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life ; thorns also 
and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; ... in 
the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return 
unto the ground.** ^ Had part, then, of the rich en- 
dowment of man been dominion over those great forces 
of nature, which determined its fecundity and made the 
world literally a Paradise for his residence, as well as 
rule over the creatures, come to him from the lavish 
hand of his heavenly Father? And did the perversion 
of his will work such havoc that those forces beneficent 

iQen. 1 : 28. s^: I'j^ig* 



Original Sin 141 

in their operation began now to produce evil ? But it 
is objected all this helps nothing. We must go back 
seons before the appearance of man upon the globe to 
even touch the root of the difficulty. Very well, let us 
do so. And to assist us let us call to our aid the first 
two verses of the Bible. *^In the beginning God 
created the heaven, and the earth. And the earth was 
without form and void; and darkness was upon the 
face of the deep.** After the original creation, and be- 
fore that process which is described as the six days' work 
which resulted in the condition of our globe as we have 
it now, the earth had been reduced to '* wasteness and 
desolation.'*^ One of those great cataclysms, of which 
Mr. Spencer finds such conclusive evidence in nature, 
had taken place. What was the reason of this ? We find 
that when man was first placed in Eden God already had 
an enemy. If then we conceive that, in ages long gone 
by, in the beginning is the scriptural phrase, the earth 
had been a scene of order, committed to the rule of pure 
spirits, as ages after it was to man ; that their defection 
occurred in a manner similar to that of man ; except that 
in their case there was no external temptation, and their 
fall took place through the exercise of that volitional 
liberty, which we have seen to be involved in the very 
idea of a free will, it seems as if we had arrived at a 
rational account of the evils which constitute the enigmas 
of the world and man. Startling as all this may seem it 
appears to be the view set forth in scripture. Satan 
appears, under God's permission it is true, to be able to 

^ Thohu va bohu. 



142 Religion for the Time 

accomplish his purposes not merely through the agency of 
the wills of wicked men, but by the direction of the forces 
of nature, such as the lightning and tornado, ^ and those 
which produce disease. '-^ Whatever may be thought of 
the view now presented, no one can escape the obvious 
truth that in scripture the evils present in the lower crea- 
tion are incident to the rebellion of free created wills; 
and will be eradicated when they are finally overcome.^ 
If therefore, the moral creatures had stood firm through 
their probation and so established themselves in ** God's 
service, which is perfect freedom," there is reason to be- 
lieve that not one of those evils which intrude themselves 
in every sphere of being, w^ould have come into existence. 
We know that nothing can successfully defeat the will of 
God. If angel or man, in the use of his God -given 
liberty, rises up in opposition, God changes His dispensa- 
tion, but His purpose continues and pursues its undis- 
turbed advance towards its predestined fulfillment. And 
all we need to conclude, at this point, is that what God 

^ Job. 1 : 13-19. 

5 St. Lukes 13 : 16 and numerous related passages. 

3 " For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the 
manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made 
subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath 
subjected the same; in hope, because the creature itself shall be 
delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty 
of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation 
groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now : and not only 
they but ourselves also, which have the first-fruits of the spirit, 
even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adop- 
tion, to wit, the redemption of our body " (Rom. 8 : 19-24). 



Original Sin 143 

is accomplishing now with adverse forces He would 
have achieved to the felicity of all sentient beings, had 
they always worked smoothly in accordance with His 
will. 

Can we catch a glimpse of the method of His proced- 
ure ? Suppose we look for it first in what might appear 
the least promising quarter. You know that pain, with 
its resultant death, is the greatest obstacle in the physical 
world to belief in the goodness of God. But what do we 
find God, everywhere in nature, producing by them? 
Is it not development? ^^ I speak with great diffidence, 
with great deference, ' * says a very helpful writer, ' ^ but so 
far as I can see the law which is paramount, and the 
furthest reaching in nature, is the one which combines 
into one decree, these two clauses : ^ Be fruitful and multi- 
ply — slay and eat.* And the main object, if I may 
venture so to construe in inadequate language the apparent 
object of an infinite mind proclaimed in facts, seems to 
be the production, through sacrifice, of higher life out of 
the death of the lower." ^ It is in accordance with this 
very law that revelation informs us that God has come 
to our rescue from those far more terrible evils that 
thwart and despoil the grandeur of our moral life. St. 
Leo the Great has put this in such few and trenchant 
words that I cannot resist the temptation to borrow them. 
** To end this mocking sport wherein captive souls were 
at the beck of the insulting enemy, the law's teachings 
suffice not, nor could our nature be restored by the 
prophet's exhortations alone ; but a real redemption had 

^ " Reassuring Hints," Footman, p. 98. 



144 Religion for the Time 

to be superadded to moral instructions, and a stock 
tainted from the beginning required to pass through a 
new birth, and start fresh. For those who had to be 
reconciled a victim had to be offered, which should be 
both associated to our race and untouched by our con- 
tamination ; that this purpose of God, whereby it was 
His pleasure that the sin of the whole world should be 
effaced by Jesus Christ's nativity and passion, might 
extend itself to the ages of all generations/'^ And 
'^ since the devil had not so proceeded by sheer force 
against the first man, as to draw him over to his own 
side against his free-will, therefore in such sort were that 
voluntary sin and that hostile design to be destroyed, as 
that the gift of grace should not clash with the rule of 
justice. Accordingly amid the universal ruin of the 
whole human race, there was but one remedy, which, 
under the mysterious law of the divine procedure, could 
come to the aid of the prostrate ; and that was if some 
son of Adam could be born, unconnected with original 
transgression, and innocent, who could benefit the rest 
both by his example and by his merit. But as natural 
generation did not allow of this, and the offshoot of a 
vitiated root could not be without that seed of which 
scripture says, * Who can make him clean who was con- 
ceived of impure seed. Is it not thou who art alone ? ' 
the Lord of David became the Son of David, and from 
the fruit of the promised sprout arose an un vitiated off- 
spring, by the combination of two natures in one person ; 
so that by the same conception and the same child-bearing 

1 « On the Incarn.," Bright, pp. 8, 9. 



Original Sin 145 

was born our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom were present 
both very Godhead for the performance of miracles, 
and very manhood for the endurance of suffering/* ^ 

Our Lord endures in His Own Person all the untold 
agonies which were involved in the action of perverted 
free-wills wreaking their diabolical malice on Him who 
was without sin, and so vanquished them. It was in 
fact the struggle to the death of all the powers of dark- 
ness endeavoring once more to overcome a free will 
clothed about by our human nature. This time man 
triumphed, for the Person whom Satan strove with was 
God Himself ! That invincible strength He is graciously 
pleased to infuse into all those who are willing, really and 
earnestly willing, to receive it. And the channels 
through which it shall flow down from Him to us are the 
blessed Sacraments. 

" O ! wisest love, that flesh and blood, 
That did in Adam fail, 
Should strive afresh against the foe 
Should strive and should prevail. 
And that a nobler gift than grace 
Should flesh and blood refine, 
God's Presence and His very Self, 
And Essence all Divine." 2 

What Christ did in our nature, He accords to us the 
sublime privilege of doing after Him. He vanquished 
by the Cross, and He permits us to take up our cross 
daily and follow Him. We have still much pain, and 

* " On the Incarn.," Bright, p. 21. 
2 Newman, " Dream of Zerontius." 



146 Religion for the Time 

death closes the scene of our mortal contest. We hav« 
still a fearful conflict to wage with the powers of darkness 
disputing every foot of the territory of our moral life. 
But what is the unspeakable guerdon which Christ's 
victory makes possible to us even in this life ? It is a 
victory, in our own nature, like in kind, inferior in de- 
gree, to His own. We are made ^'partakers of His 
holiness." Who can doubt it? Who has not seen, at 
least, one saint ? And who that has ever looked upon 
that spectacle of ineffable loveliness can mistake the 
heavenly source of its inexpressible beauty and charm ? 

And so I think we may see that God has done the 
very best He could for us. We by our perversity intro- 
duced into the world a counter force acting in opposition 
to that set in motion by His holy will. God would not 
annihilate the free-will He had called into existence as 
the highest product of His creative power. He could 
not and remain Himself. His victory must, therefore, be 
moral. That will arrayed against Him must have full 
scope for its exercise. He therefore does not stop the 
pain physical or moral. But what does He do ? He in- 
troduces a dispensation under which the tendency of that 
pain will be to v/in the v/ill — to lead the child to rush to 
its natural refuge, to pillow its head on its Father's 
breast. This is salvation. If in the free exercise of its 
liberty the will persists in refusing to learn the obvious 
lesson of its discipline it thus demonstrates to its entire 
satisfaction, as Satan did, when by the Cross he endeav- 
ored to draw away our Lord from His allegiance, that 
having had every opportunity, and having done all he 



Original Sin 147 

could, he has still been able to do nothing really against 
the will of God. And here too is an absolute, moral 
victory for God. Not one in which we can take the de- 
light, which the other excites, but quite as signal ; and 
Scripture teaches, though we cannot understand it now, 
quite as much to the glory, the accidental glory of God, 
which is all that the creature is honored by the oppor- 
tunity to contribute to. 

Still you ask the question, why does God permit evil 
to go on ? If the devil is at the back of it, why does He 
not with one sweep of His almighty arm blot him out of 
existence? I have already given you the answer. To 
do this would be to confess that He had found a creature 
whom He could not rule. That is to say that He is hot 
really God. This would be the triumph of Satan's real 
contention. Why do you want Satan annihilated? Is it 
not because you desire to be free from the labor and 
difficulty involved in overcoming him ? Well, would it 
not be braver and nobler in you to take your part, like a 
man, in doing all you can, to show your gratitude to 
God for all that He has done for you, to conquer the 
arch-enemy of all good, of God Himself? 

And now we are ready for the ultimate question. If 
God knew that all this evil would result from His crea- 
tion why did He not abide in the nameless felicity which 
He had in the ineffable converse of the Three Sacred 
Persons which constitute His Being ? And the answer is 
that He also knew that *Uhe sufferings of this present 
time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that 
shall be revealed in us." Leaving everything else out 



148 Religion for the Time 

of account the evil is for time, the bliss will last through- 
out eternity ! 

Thus I trust it has been made clear that the very diffi- 
culties of Theism, taken in connection with its dis- 
closures, lead us up to the entrance to the bridge by 
which we pass safely over the turbid waters which threat- 
ened to engulf us in all the horrors of infidelity — material- 
ism, agnosticism, pessimism. In the year 1855 one of 
the most magnificent achievements of mechanical skill 
which the world had up to that time seen was perfected. 
A great bridge was suspended from cables over the Niagara 
river. Higher up the river were the falls dashing in 
their relentless fury from their precipitous height, carry- 
ing death and destruction to all life which they could en- 
fold within the embrace of their pitiless waters, subhme 
by virtue of the very terrors which the spectacle of them 
strikes into the heart of man. Beneath the bridge, rush- 
ing with incredible velocity, surging, foaming, leaping, 
dashing, the rapids pass, glorious to look upon, but doing 
to the death all that may possibly have survived the 
shock of the falls. And then further down, but still 
within sight of the bridge, is the whirlpool, the most 
fascinating object in nature. As placid as a mountain 
lake it pursues its course round and round without cessa- 
tion or pause, till the head turns giddy as our charmed 
eyes are fixed upon it, and our imagination persuades us, 
almost, that we have before us a picture of eternity. But 
nothing that once enters those sinuous waters can be ex- 
tricated from their clutch. The revolutions may be for a 
^ Jong time slow and near the circumference, but the circles 



Original Sin 149 

become smaller and the motion more rapid, till at last 
they reach the maelstrom and are borne beneath the tide. 
You have already guessed my parable. We have in 
these incomparable wonders of nature the figure of the 
fall of man, the hideous and unthinking destruction 
wrought by human passion, and the slower and more 
refined, it may be, but not less deadly havoc of the 
insidious corruption of the world. Just as across Sus- 
pension Bridge not only foot-passengers and carriages, 
but railroad trains might carry the traffic of a continent, 
in safety above all the dangers that raged below; so 
Revelation, or rather our Lord, who is Revelation, the 
Logos, the Word of God, is He who by His grace lifts us 
up and enables us to walk erect and uncontarainated, 
superior to the temptations of the world, the flesh, and 
the devil. He is the Bridge by which we may pass from 
the country of the enemy to our heavenly home. Or 
rather, to employ the more accurate figure of Scripture, 
His Perfect Human Nature is that ladder which Jacob 
dimly and in vision saw set up on earth and the top of it 
reached unto heaven, and the angels of God ascending 
and descending on it. Yes they bear up the cry of our 
needy and sinful lives to the ear of Jesus and bear back 
to us the requisite supply of grace and mercy. '^Hav- 
ing therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest, 
by the blood of Jesus, let us draw near with a true heart 
in full assurance of faith.'* ^ We shall mount that ladder 
round by round till one day we shall stand forever at 
His right hand 1 

1 Heb. 10 ; 19, 22. 



VI 

GOD'S METHOD OF PRESERVING 
HIS REVELATION TO ALL AGES 



The Authority of the Catholic Church 



CONFERENCE VI 

GOD'S METHOD OF PRESERVING HIS REVELATION 

TO ALL AGES 

The Authority of the Catholic Church 

To a very large number of people I suppose that it 
would be difficult to express in so few words a proposi- 
tion that would awaken so much antagonism as is aroused 
by the caption of this conference. The great majority 
are aware that they have been able to give little time to 
research in religious directions. They are also aware to 
a greater or less extent that their ideas on this class of 
subjects are more vague and variable than they would 
find it wise to content themselves with in the ordinary 
affairs of practical life, their business or profession. Still 
they go on, many of them through life, consciously, or 
more likely, unconsciously on the principle once an- 
nounced to the present writer — *' I have not time to read 
up on these subjects and so I have to think them out for 
myself.'* 

This, it seems, reflects the attitude of a large number 
of minds to religious questions in the present day. And 
just here we note a phenomenon which is not a little 
interesting. In a somewhat extended talk with a gentle- 
man he alluded to the impossibility of a man like him- 

IS3 



154 Religion for the Time 

self, who had read widely and was a thinker, accepting 
the main positions of Christianity. His conversation did 
not to my mind display any great familiarity with the 
literature of the subject, nor did his thought appear to 
be very clear. In fact he seemed to mix up and con- 
fuse a great many topics in themselves totally distinct. 
So I asked a friend of his, whose mental and literary 
attainments relieved him of any suspicion of prejudice 
in the matter, if this gentleman was considered by his 
intimates in the light in which he had represented himself. 
His answer was both prompt and emphatic. '< A great 
reader, no. Thinker! He's just a jolly good fellow." 
Probably if we were to interrogate a large number of 
representative laymen we would find just this state of 
affairs to exist. Each one very confident of his own 
religious positions, and of his ability to change them 
frequently and at his option ; and the rest, for the most 
part, satisfied that the others were but meagrely equipped 
for arriving at solid conclusions in matters of such high 
import. If God made a revelation, as we have seen 
reason to believe He did, it seems hardly probable that 
He took no more effective measures to secure its trans- 
mission than are involved in the process we have but 
now contemplated. If He has adopted better it would 
seem both to our interest and our wisdom to accept 
them. 

But when we speak of the authority of the Church a 
large number of people brace themselves against the in- 
fallibility of the Pope, even as the war-horse in the Book 
of Job ^' smelleth the battle afar off.*' Let us then hasten 



Revelation to all Ages 155 

to disarm suspicion. Our attitude to this new dogma is 
about as serious as that displayed by the Irish woman in 
the story Bishop Potter is said to have told. One of his 
suburban clergy was engaged in the arduous work, in 
which his brethren can so feelingly sympathize, of getting 
his sermon into shape for the pulpit on Sunday morning. 
The quiet and concentration so necessary to success in 
his undertaking were rudely broken in upon by sounds 
as of the voice of an excited and irate female issuing 
from the kitchen. He hurried thither, lest his train of 
thought should be lost and gone forever, to find his cook 
taking exception to a tramp's preferences as to what his 
breakfast should be. In the interests of peace and of 
the sermon, which was in danger of vanishing altogether, 
he said: <* Bridget, do give the man some bread; you 
know he must be hungry.*' ^^Ah," rejoined Bridget, 
'*the horrid Dago! Do you think I have nothing else 
to do but work the arms oif of me to feed the likes of 
him?** *'Sh — hush, Bridget,** responded the peace- 
maker, '' you must not talk so. Do you not know that 
the head of your own Church is an Italian, and you 
consider him infallible ? *' '' Yes, I do,** flashed from the 
ready wit of the maiden from the Emerald Isle, ' ^ but 
faith, he*s not half so infallible as he would have been 
if he had been an Irishman.** No; authority of the 
type recently announced from the Vatican is some nine- 
teen centuries too late to be that of the CathoHc Church. 
Authority ? What is it ? It is the right to be heard 
and obeyed. In the final analysis, you will perceive, it 
is the sovereign prerogative of Almighty God. 



156 Religion for the Time 

The Catholic Church ? It is that historical society 
which was founded by Christ Himself, and has been in 
the world from that day to the present in an unbroken 
continuity, and may be recognized in any place or age 
by its three primal and ineffaceable marks — the Apostolic 
ministry, the Apostolic faith and the Apostolic Sacra- 
ments.^ It was called Catholic, universal, because it 
was bidden to go into all the world and preach the gospel 
to every creature. It was endowed and qualified by its 
divine Head to meet the wants and satisfy the aspirations 
of every soul of man of every country and every age. It 
is the Catholic Church because its mission from its Lord 
is not less than one of truth and grace — salvation to a 
world. 

It seems certain that if the claim involved in these 
last two paragraphs can be made good, if it can be shown 
that God has made known His mind and will and has 
made His Church the custodian of His truth, from 
which we may receive it in its purity and entirety, most 
earnest men will hail the exhibition with joy and will be 
eager to obtain the seats of disciples. The proof shall 
be not any extravagant claim for authority, but an en- 
deavor faithfully to recall first, the process by which as a 
matter of fact the faith was promulgated, by which the 
gospel came into all the world ; and then, still confining 
ourselves to an historical survey, bring before our minds 
the actual means employed by those on whom it de- 
volved in the providence of God to hand on the truth 
without loss, and without accretion by error, to those ' 

1 Acts 2 : 42. 



Revelation to all Ages 157 

who took up the staff of office as, through age and in- 
firmity, it was about to fall from their hands. 

Whatever else men may be doubtful about concern- 
ing the work of our Lord, as to this there is absolute un- 
animity — He was a great teacher. It is equally certain 
that He had no sooner begun His career as a preacher than 
He began to gather about Him that chosen band of disci- 
ples whom He was afterwards to make apostles.^ About a 
year has elapsed and the opposition to Him has become 
so pronounced that it is no longer compatible with His 
purpose to teach directly and He adopts the medium of 
parables, uncomprehended by the people, but *'when 
they were alone He expounded all things to His dis- 
ciples.** ^ The Passion is at hand and He prophesies it 
to them in detail, but they are incapable of fathoming 
His meaning.' And even when the betrayer is upon 
Him He says, <*The Comforter, which is the Holy 
Ghost, whom the Father will send in My name. He 
shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your 
remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.*'* ^'I 
have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot 
bear them now. Howbeit when He the Spirit of truth 
is come He will guide you into all truth. . . . He 
shall receive of mine and show it unto you.** ^ His death 
and resurrection follow. The apostles are naturally re- 
ceptive of wide reaches of truth to which previously our 
Lord almost pathetically acknowledges that He had 

1 St. Matt. 4 : 17, 18. 2 St. Mark 4 : 34. 

3 St. Luke 18: 31-34. *St. John 14: 25, 26. 

6 St. John 16; 12-15. 



158 Religion for the Time 

found them impervious. Now ihty can **bear" them, 
and accordingly we are informed that Christ occupied 
Himself, during the appearances of the Great Forty 
Days, in ^* Speaking of the things pertaining to the King- 
dom of God." ^ In this way He perfected their partial 
apprehensions of truth and declared to them what was 
wanting to their full enlightenment for the discharge of 
the sublime mission with which He was about to intrust 
them — to found the Church and fill her with the knowl- 
edge of His truth. And now when they know all that 
must be done and taught for the salvation of mankind, 
as He is about to go to the Father He gives them their 
final and plenary commission, ^* Go ye therefore and 
make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to 
observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. 
And lo I am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
world." ^ We may reverently conceive that He regarded 
them as both adequately replenished with the truth and 
forearmed against error. 

Ten days later, on the descent of the Holy Ghost, you 
remember, they set about the energetic accomplishment 
of their glorious work. The remainder of the New 
Testament is, in fact, little more than the record of its 
achievement. It will be well, however, for us to recall 
that God seems to have ordained that the transmission 
of His Revelation to mankind was to be determined by 
two laws. First : tradition, the handing down of truth 
from generation to generation by means of oral testi- 
mony. And secondly : the supernatural guidance of the 

^ Acts 1:3. 2 St. Matt. 28 : 19, 20. 



Revelation to all Ages 159 

Holy Ghost. These two laws, however, are not sharply 
discriminated in the actual work of the Church as the 
teacher of divine revelation, but constantly run into 
each other and touch each other at many points. It will 
be evident, we trust, as we call your attention to what 
actually took place, that the viva voci testimony, while 
in every sense natural, was superintended and directed 
by the Spirit of God. Its unanimity will, we hope, im- 
press you with the conviction that it is explicable on no 
other ground. And we shall see as well that the agency 
of the Holy Ghost never fails to make itself evident, but 
by directing attention to the identity and continuity of 
the faith from the time whence it took its rise in the 
teaching of the apostles. 

The apostles after Pentecost went forth on their great 
work of the evangelization of the world. St. Paul, to- 
wards the end of his life, assures the Colossians ^ that their 
mission had been fulfilled. And both the Epistles and 
the Book of Acts make it clear that simultaneously with 
their work of teaching the people at large, following the 
example of their Teacher, they were training men by 
deeper and more thorough acquaintance with the faith 
than was either necessary or possible to the masses, w^ho 
should be competent to become their successors. And 
now as advancing years warn them that they shall not be 
able much longer to hold up the light of truth that its 
bright beams may fall upon and illumine a world dark 
with sin and error, they do two things. First : they 
place their successors in posts of authority and trust. 

1 Col. 1 : 6. 



i6o Religion for the Time 

Saint Timothy has his jurisdiction in Ephesus. But what 
are his instructions? *^Hold fast the form of sound 
words, which thou hast heard of me, in faith and love 
which is in Christ Jesus/' ^ *' And the things that thou 
hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same com- 
mit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach 
others also.** ' Titus too receives his credentials. '* For 
this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in 
order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in 
every city.** These latter, together with necessary moral 
and spiritual qualifications, must be *^ apt to teach ^** ; 
<* holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, 
that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort 
and to convince the gainsayers.'* * And why? ^'For 
there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers 
. . . whose mouths must be stopped . . . teach- 
ing things which they ought not.**^ These passages, 
with a large number of others, which it would be mere 
repetition to quote, make it clear that the apostles real- 
ized that they were the custodians of the very truth of 
God and that they sought conscientiously by every 
means to arrange for its transmission in its integrity for 
all time by determining the media and establishing the 
law by which it should be handed down. 

They did one thing more which was, at least, not less 
important. They embodied the great truths of Chris- 
tianity in permanent form in their writings. One of 
them expressly reveals to us his motive, which whether 

1 2 Tim. 1:13. 22 Tim. 2:2. 3 i Tim. 3 : 2. 

4 Tit. 1 : 5, 9 ; «/^/V., 10, 11. 



Revelation to all Ages 161 

or not it was always consciously before the minds of the 
other writers of the New Testament, certainly represents 
the mind of the Divine Spirit under Whose impulse they 
wrote. ** Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you 
always in remembrance of these things, though ye know 
them, and be established in the present truth. Yea I 
think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle to stir 
you up by putting you in remembrance ; knowing that 
shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our 
Lord Jesus Christ hath showed me. Moreover, I will 
endeavor that ye may be able after my decease to have 
these things always in remembrance." ^ In these words 
the function of God's Word written is definitely an- 
nounced. It is not to teach the truth. It is to prevent 
those who have been schooled in it and are familiar with 
it from losing its blessed principles and priceless gems. 
It is that the Church in all ages, no matter to what period 
her existence might be prolonged, might hold in her pos- 
session an indisputable standard of appeal. You will at 
once see how indispensable to her office as the teacher 
of the world it is that God should have thus endowed 
her. Had she gone forth with the tradition of the truth 
alone, it could not have failed that in the lapse of ages 
her witness would have both changed and grown less 
clear — obscured by the muddy stream of time. This is 
the fatal experience of all merely oral testimony at the 
hands of man. And there is much in the history of the 
Church, where God's Word has had not its due recogni- 
tion, to warn us of what corruption truth, with no better 

^ 2 Peter I : 12-15. 



i62 Religion for the Time 

safeguard than the memory of man from age to age, 
might suffer. On the other hand, the experience of the 
last three centuries and a half, in those places where the 
faith of the Church, as the light in which Scripture yields 
up its profound and blessed treasures, has been over- 
looked or contemned gives the imagination a basis on 
which to picture what would have been the fate of truth 
left to the uncontrolled vagaries of the intellect of man. 
If Protestantism has a lesson to convey to the world it is 
that if man may hope to advance towards the truth by 
the Bible, nay if he is to hope to retain any appreciable 
portion of the Bible, the Bible must have an accredited 
interpreter. A mere gymnasium for the exercise of the 
ingenuity of the mind, may do much to develop the 
brawn of that mind, and also entertain us with many 
thrilling and exquisitely graceful feats ; but it can never 
be more than a recreation for boys, be their years more 
tender or more mature. It can never do more than in- 
dicate the point of departure of the individual. The 
seriousness of manhood demands, it may be confidently 
alleged, that there be a standard to which the laborers 
in the mine of truth may refer their products and the 
precious metal be distinguished from the worthless dross. 
We should make a great mistake did we suppose that 
the Apostolic Church contained no heretics. Indeed the 
writers of the New Testament constantly mourn their 
presence and the necessity to proceed against them with 
the sword of the Spirit. St. Peter, for example, declares 
Simon Magus to be in the gall of bitterness and the 
bond of iniquity, and St. Paul delivers Hymenseus and 



Revelation to all Ages 163 

Alexander unto Satan that they may learn not to blas- 
pheme. There is, however, a typical case mentioned in 
which the personal authority of apostles did not avail to 
silence or control the adversary. When Sts. Barnabas 
and Paul had returned to the Syrian Antioch after their 
first missionary journey, ^* Certain men which came down 
from Judaea, taught the brethren and said. Except ye be 
circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be 
saved. When therefore Paul and Barnabas had no 
small dissension and disputation with them (which was 
apparently ineffectual) they determined (that is the 
church at Antioch) that Paul and Barnabas, and certain 
other of them, should go up to Jerusalem to the apostles 
and elders about this question.'*^ ^' And the apostles 
and elders came together for to consider of this matter.'* ^ 
When opponents had been fully heard St. Peter expresses 
his view. Then follows the testimony of the two great 
missionaries. And finally St. James, Bishop of Jerusa- 
lem, declares the judgment of the council. It goes forth 
to the troubled churches in language which may well 
arrest the attention. ^'It seemed good to the Holy 
Ghost and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than 
these necessary things.*' ^ Then follow the specifications. 
Judas and Silas are deputed with Barnabas and Paul 
to communicate the decision to the districts where the 
Judaisers had introduced dissension. The manner in 
which they discharged their office and the result which 
ensued are conveyed to us in these graphic terms : ** As 
they went through the cities, they delivered them the de- 

* Acts 15:1,2. « Verse 6. » Verse 28. 



164 Religion for the Time 

crees for to keep (not to repudiate or even to discuss), that 
were ordained of the apostles and elders which were at 
Jerusalem. And so were the churches established in the 
faith and increased in numbers daily." ^ The whole 
Church regarded the matter as settled. Judgment had 
gone forth from the court of highest arbitrament. The 
whole body of the apostles had met together, had dili- 
gently considered the subject, and from every point of 
view. The result had been a consentient verdict, and 
they did not hesitate to send it forth to the Church at 
large as the judgment of the Holy Ghost. It was their 
confident persuasion that their Lord had kept His 
promise. In the manner above indicated, and in the 
matter submitted to them, the *' Holy Ghost had led them 
into all the truth." 

When we descend to post-apostolic times we shall find 
that the successors of the apostles were determined, in all 
their doctrinal utterances, by these two laws which we 
have now seen that the apostles laid down and stead- 
fastly adhered to during their lives. First : the trans- 
mission of the faith by testimony on the part of those 
whom they had themselves carefully taught and had 
placed in positions of authority and trust for the express 
purpose of handing on ^' the faith once for all^ delivered." 
We have seen how in the performance of this great work 
they were guarded from the human tendency to add or 
diminish, as time went on, by their possession of a per- 
manent, written standard of appeal. This channel of 

1 Chap. 16: 4, 5. 

» The word employed is ana^^ St. Jude 3. 



Revelation to all Ages 165 

truth was fortified and supplemented by what we have 
termed the second law which is the supernatural guidance 
of the Spirit of truth expressing His mind through the 
voice of the college of the apostles. You will remember 
all along that this is simply an historical enquiry. We 
are not attempting to discover a theory of authority, 
much less to exploit one of our own. We are merely 
placing before you the actual method employed by those, 
whom Christ endowed and deputed to teach the world, 
in *' the confirmation and defense of the gospel." 

It is impossible, probably, to convey to another, the 
impression produced upon the mind by a careful and 
somewhat extensive study of the fathers. It is not 
merely that they constantly tell us that they were guided 
altogether in their teaching by the tradition of the faith 
delivered by those before them. It may be said of them 
all as has been said of St. Athanasius, by a great writer, 
'^ He is in no sense an enquirer nor a mere disputant, he 
has received and he transmits. Such is his position 
though the expressions and turn of sentences which indi- 
cate it are so delicate and indirect, and so scattered 
about his pages, that it is difficult to collect them and ana- 
lyze what they imply.*' ^ Thus, for instance, in a cursory 
reading of Eusebius' History, I have marked fifteen separate 
places where he states that the individual whose method 
he is describing felt it his duty to teach nothing, but 
what he had himself been taught. And all this is within 
about 200 pages ; that is to say, he tells us that this was 
the principle observed by every man of prominence in 

1 Newman " Athan.," II, 250-1). 



i66 Religion for the Time 

the first three centuries. With this understanding then 
that it is impossible in a few quotations to convey to the 
hearer an adequate idea of the fideUty of the fathers to the 
tradition of the faith, I proceed to let them speak for 
themselves. The first I shall adduce is Papius, a man 
whose youth was spent in the lifetime of some of the 
apostles. 

''I shall not regret to subjoin to my interpolations, 
also for your benefit, whatsoever I have at any time, 
accurately ascertained and treasured up in my memory, 
as I have received it from the elders^ and have recorded 
it in order to give additional confirmation to the truth, 
by my testimony. For I have never, like many, de- 
lighted to hear those that tell many things, but those 
that teach the truth, neither those that record foreign 
precepts, but those that are given from the Lord to our 
faith, and that came from the truth itself. But if I met 
with any one who had been a follower of the elders any- 
where, I made it a point to enquire what were the decla- 
rations of the elders ; what was said by Andrew, Peter, 
or Philip; what by Thomas, James, John, Matthew, or 
any other of the disciples of our Lord ; for I do not 
think that I derived so much benefit from books as from 
the living voice of those that are still surviving.** ^ 

We pass down a generation and come to the time of 
St. Irenseus, who tells us that in his youth he talked 
with St. Polycarp ^ who as you know was made Bishop 
of Ephesus by St. John. We are now two removes 
from the apostle and what does he tell us? ''For, 

^Eus, Ecc. Hist., Bk. Ill, chap, xxxix. ^YtV, III, chap. iv. 



Revelation to all Ages 167 

as to the Church, dispersed as she is through the 
whole world unto the ends of the earth, yet having re- 
ceived from the apostles and their disciples the faith.'* 
He proceeds to give the creed substantially as we have it 
to-day. 

He then goes on — **This preaching and this faith, 
the Church, as we said before, dispersed as she is in 
the whole world keeps diligently, as though she dwelt 
but in one house : and her belief herein is just as if she 
had one only soul, and the same heart, and she proclaims 
and teaches and delivers these things harmoniously, as 
possessing one mouth. Thus while the languages of the 
world differ the tenor of the tradition is one and the 
same. And neither have the churches situated in the 
regions of Germany believed otherwise, nor do they hold 
any other tradition, neither in the parts of Spain nor 
among the Celts, nor in the East, nor in Egypt, nor in 
Lybia, nor those which are situate in the middle parts of 
the earth. But as the sun, the creature of God, is in all 
the world one and the same ; so also the preaching of the 
truth shines everywhere, and enlightens all men who 
wish to come to the knowledge of the truth. And 
neither he who is altogether mighty in speech among 
those who preside in our churches, will utter anything 
different from this, (for no man is above his Master), nor 
will he who is weak in discourse abate aught of the 
tradition. Yea, the faith being one and the same, 
neither he that is able to speak much of it hath anything 
over, nor he that speaks but little any lack." ^ 

I I. X., I, 2. 



l68 Religion for the Time 

In a later part of his work he declares the mode by 
which the truth was promulged. ** The Lord of all 
gave to His apostles the power of the gospel; and by 
them we have known the truth, /. ^., the teaching of the 
Son of God, to whom also the Lord said. He that heareth 
you, heareth Me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth 
Me and Him that sent Me." 

'* For by no others have we known the method of salva- 
tion, than by those by whom the gospel came to us ; 
which was both in the first place preached by them, and 
afterwards by the will of God handed down to us in the 
scriptures to be the ground and pillar of our faith." ^ 
He then proceeds to warn us of our duty. '^The 
proofs being so abundant, we ought no more to 
look for the truth elsewhere, which it is easy to 
obtain from the Church, the apostles having therein 
most abundantly deposited, as in a rich storehouse, 
whatsoever appertains to the truth. So that whosoever 
will, may take from her the draught of life. For this is 
the entrance into life, but all the rest are thieves and rob- 
bers. Wherefore we ought, shunning them, with all 
diligence to love what belongs to the Church, and to lay 
hold of the tradition of the truth. For why ? though 
the dispute were but of some ordinary question, would it 
not be meet to recur to the most ancient Churches, 
where the apostles went in and out, and from them to 
receive, on any present question, that which is certain 
and clear indeed? And what if not even the apostles 
themselves had left us any scriptures ? ought we not to 

2Bk. III., Pref. Ii, I. 



Revelation to all Ages 169 

follow the course of that tradition, which they delivered 
to those whom they entrusted with the Churches? " ^ 

* * Wherefore we should hearken to those Presbyters 
who are in the Church ; those who have their succession 
from the apostles as we have pointed out; who with 
their succession in the episcopate received a sure gift of 
the truth, at the good pleasure of the Father; but the 
rest who withdraw from the primitive succession, and 
gather in any place whatever, we must hold in suspicion, 
either as heretics and evil-minded, or as making 
division, and lifted up and pleasing themselves ; or again, 
as hypocrites, so behaving for gain and vainglory's sake. 
But all these have fallen from the truth.*' ^ 

We have heard witnesses from Asia and from France. 
Passing down the stream of time one more generation, 
let us also go to the south and hear Tertullian in his 
home in Africa. '' On this principle we shape our rule : 
That if the Lord Jesus Christ sent the apostles to preach, 
no others ought to be received as preachers than those 
whom Christ appointed ; for [ no man knoweth the Father 
save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son hath re- 
vealed Him.' Neither doth the Son seem to have re- 
vealed Him to any other than to the apostles, whom He 
sent to preach, to witness that which He revealed unto 
them. Now what they did preach, that is, what Christ 
did reveal unto them, I will here also rule must be 
proved in no other way than by those same Churches 
which the apostles themselves founded ; themselves, I 
say, by preaching to them as well viva voce (as men 

iIII, IV, I. 2 Bk. IV, chap, xxvi, 2. 



lyo Religion for the Time 

say) as afterwards by Epistles. If these things be so, 
it becometh forthwith manifest that all doctrine, which 
agreeth with these Apostolic Churches, the wombs and 
originals of the faith must be accounted true, as without 
doubt containing that which the Churches have received 
from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, Christ from 
God ; and that all other doctrines must be judged at 
once to be false, which savoreth things contrary to the 
truth of the Churches, and of the apostles, and of Christ, 
and of God/' ^ 

We have now heard witnesses from the extreme east, 
the far west, and the south, and these following the days 
of the apostles in three successive generations. There is 
no way in which this unanimity in the whole Church of 
Christ can be accounted for except that she had so been 
taught by the apostles whom Christ sent into the world. 
It may be felt, however, that later the Church became 
careless and ceased to adhere to the apostles* rule. In 
other words, admitted corruptions. Let us therefore 
pass over nearly two centuries and a half, (in which let 
me remind you that it would be easy to bring forward all 
the great minds of the Church to show that there was no 
change in her attitude to the faith once for all delivered) 
and come to the second quarter of the fifth century. 
Here we find the great classic work of antiquity upon 
authority — the Commonitory of St. Vincent of Lerins. I 
cannot possibly do justice to this writer in the two quo- 
tations with which I must be content. I think, however, 
I shall not fail to show you that his testimony places the 

iTert. Praes. Her. XXI. 



Revelation to all Ages 171 

Church before us in the same light as does that of his 
antecedents. She has not moved a particle from her 
original position. 

**In the Catholic Church itself, also, great care is to 
be taken that we hold that which has been believed 
everywhere, always and by all. . . . Universality 
we follow, by confessing that to be the one true faith, 
which the whole Church throughout the world professes. 
Antiquity by in no wise receding from those senses 
which it is manifest our holy elders and fathers generally 
held. Consent, in like manner, by adopting in antiquity 
itself, such definitions and opinions as have been held by 
all, or, at any rate, by almost all, the priests and doctors 
together.'*^ 

And that he relies on the ancients as witnesses to the 
truth they had in turn received from Christ, and not at 
all as expressing their own opinions, he asserts over and 
over again. I simply produce a sample passage. After 
telling us that we are to rely only upon those fathers who 
have lived and died in the communion of the Catholic 
Church, he proceeds : *'Even these, moreover, are to be 
credited on this condition, that whatever either all or the 
most part, have, as it were by a council of teachers agree- 
ing among themselves, plainly, frequently and persever- 
ingly affirmed as by them received, held and handed 
down ; that is to be accounted indubitable, certain and 
settled : but whatever any, be he holy and learned, be he 
a bishop, be he a confessor and martyr, may have held 
either beside and beyond, or against all the rest ; that is 

* Chap. iii. 



172 Religion for the Time 

to be classed apart from the authority of common, public 
and general opinion, among peculiar, occult and private 
notions : lest with great peril of eternal salvation, after 
the sacrilegious custom of heretics and schismatics, we 
leave the truth of universal doctrine, to follow the novel 
error of a single man/' ^ 

The citations that we have made from the eminent 
fathers quoted, we beg to remind you, are but typical. 
Similar utterances are characteristic of all those who were 
prominent in voicing or defending the faith in those ages 
when tradition might be regarded as authoritative, as 
echoing the voice of apostles still sounding above the 
din of the world's dissensions ; and before the faith be- 
came crystallized in the creeds and the writings of the 
great doctors of the Church. They show, I think you 
will agree with me, a conscientious effort and determina- 
tion, on the part of men who felt, with St. Paul, that 
they had been put in trust with the gospel, to hand it on 
to their successors in its purity and entirety, without 
accretion and without loss. If Christ was to secure to 
perpetual generations His revelation uncontaminated, 
through the agency of men, there seems to be little to be 
hoped for from the point of view which we have now re- 
vised, that was not actually achieved by '* these faithful men 
who in turn heard what was taught by the apostles. ' * And, 
perhaps, one of the most reliable evidences of this is the 
fact that it was not until late in the fourth century that 
heretics ever pretended to revere or to adduce an apos- 
tolic tradition. When they found how effectual it had 

1 Chap, xxviii. 



Revelation to all Ages 173 

proved in regulating the faith of the great body of Chris- 
tians they now and then attempted to show that their 
view had been held from the beginning. But for the 
most part they brazenly alleged their superiority to apos- 
tles, expressing commiseration and sympathy that the 
followers of the Lord should have been deprived of the 
advantages of their own time and the plenary effusion of 
the Spirit which they themselves enjoyed ! 

And this further consideration seems not less significant. 
The 'fathers in transmitting their testimony realized St. 
Paul's earnest request — '^I beseech you brethren by the 
name of our Lord Jesus Christ that ye all speak the same 
thing and that there be no divisions among you ; but 
that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and 
in the same judgment.'* This is a fact which, we be- 
lieve, if any one will give careful attention to he will be 
convinced, is a divine work. ''It is God that maketh 
men to be of one mind in an house.*' Certain we are 
of one thing that in the whole world you will not be able 
to find a similar instance of unanimity. Human teach- 
ers all differ, and especially in matters relating to relig- 
ion. Perfect agreement as to the faith we believe to have 
been the work of the Holy Ghost. Others may be 
loath to admit this, but they must at least allow that it 
is a fact without a parallel in human history ; and if they 
reject the Church's own explanation they must be con- 
tent to leave this unique phenomenon in the region of 
wonders, without a known cause, unaccountable. 

The second law of supernatural guidance of the Holy 
Ghost the Church found abundant necessity to call into 



174 Religion for the Time 

requisition. From the time of the first General Council 
called by the apostles till the beginning of the fourth 
century the witness of bishops and metropolitans had 
been sufficient to correct the wayward and silence the 
unruly. But in Arius a more difficult problem was pre- 
sented. He attacked the foundation-stone in the structure 
of Christianity. He denied the true divinity of our 
Lord. Alexander reasoned with him, expostulated and 
warned ; but without effect. His gifts were of the kind 
which in this day we describe as popular. He gained a 
considerable following in Alexandria, and his heresy had 
begun to spread beyond the Egyptian capital. The 
Church recalled the apostoHc precedent. A General 
Council of the bishops in all districts to which the 
Church had spread was convened in the city of Nicaea in 
the year 325. The whole subject was most carefully 
considered. Every party was heard and every phase 
discussed. Finally St. Athanasius read in the presence 
of the assembly the creed which still bears the name of 
that august body. And these bishops from all parts of 
the then known world, with the exception of seven who 
had succumbed to Arianism, gave it their unanimous 
vote. And it is especially important to note the ground 
on which it received their suffrage. They said — ''This 
is the faith delivered to our churches by the apostles and 
handed down by our predecessors to us.'* 

The decree of the council is promulged. It goes forth 
with the synodal epistle. The latter closes thus : *' Pray 
also for all of us, that the things which have been de- 
creed may prosper, and be rendered firm by Almighty 



Revelation to all Ages 175 

God and our Lord Jesus Christ, having been done, as 
we beheve, according to the good pleasure of God the 
Father, in the Holy Ghost to whom be glory forever and 
ever.*'^ 

The decree is to be '* rendered firm/' It will be re- 
membered that it was to the entire apostolic body that 
the promise of guidance into all truth was given. It is 
only, therefore, through the consentient voice of the 
entire episcopate that an utterance may be certainly 
known to be that of the Holy Ghost. While there 
was a vast number of bishops at Nicaea there were also 
many in the Church unable to be present. A century 
passes.. The work of Nice has been fully passed upon 
by the Holy Church throughout the world. The Council 
of Ephesus does not hesitate to employ the full scriptural 
expression. '*The holy synod has determined that no 
person shall be allowed to bring forward, or to write, or 
to compose any other Creed beside that which was set- 
tled by the holy fathers who were assembled in the city 
of Nicaea, with the Holy Ghosty^ 

It is not a little striking that a devout and learned 
writer, with little affinity to the doctrine of authority, 
was led in his own way and by his own studies to the 
same conclusion. ''When we consider the incompre- 
hensible nature of the Godhead, the mysterious character 
of the doctrine of the trinity, the exceeding difficulty 
and complexity of the problem which the Church had to 
solve in presenting the doctrine that there are three per- 

^ Hammond, " Councils," p. 5. 

8 Hammond, Can. vii, cf. p. 81 for same view in Counc. Chal. 



176 Religion for the Time 

sons and one God, in such a manner as to meet the re- 
quirements of scripture and the convictions of believers, 
and yet avoid all contradiction, we can hardly fail to 
refer the Church creeds on this subject, which have for 
ages secured assent and consent, not to inspiration, 
strictly speaking, but to the special guidance of the Holy 
Spirit:' "^ 

When we enquire what was the agency employed by 
the Ever-Blessed Spirit of God to bring about the pro- 
mulgation of the one faith by the General Councils, we 
find that it was the fidelity of the bishops in adhering to 
the faith once for all delivered. I shall detain you but 
with a single instance. At the close of the Council of 
Ephesus St. Cyril urged that the epistle of Capreolus be in- 
serted in the Acts on the ground, ''that he will have the 
doctrines of the ancient faith to be confirmed ; but the 
novelties both superfluously invented and wickedly pro- 
mulged to be rejected and condemned. All the bishops 
cried out : ' Those are the words of all : that we all say : 
that is the vote of all.' After which,** proceeds the 
chronicler, ''we admired and commended the great hu- 
mility and sanctity of that council ; insomuch as so large 
a number of bishops, for the most part metropolitans too, 
of so great erudition and doctrine that almost all were 
competent to dispute upon doctrinal points, when their 
very assemblage in one body might seem to give them 
boldness of themselves to venture and establish something 
new, did nevertheless innovate nothing, take nothing 
upon themselves, arrogate nothing to themselves, but 

^ Hodge, " Systematic Theology," I, 478. Italics are ours. 



Revelation to all Ages lyy 

used every kind of precaution not to hand down to 
posterity anything that they had not themselves received 
from the fathers ; thus not only well disposing of the 
matter then in hand, but also furnishing an example to 
those who should come after, how they too should rev- 
erence the doctrines of hallowed antiquity, but condemn 
the inventions of profane novelty. " ^ 

Thus we see what a General Council is and what its 
authority. It is a meeting of representative bishops 
whose duty it is to inquire what was the faith which the 
Church received from the apostles. When their judg- 
ment has been ratified by their brethren throughout the 
world it becomes a statement of irreformable truth. Be- 
cause the Holy Ghost is the soul of the Catholic Church, 
when we have obtained her mind we rest in that utterance 
as final, as being nothing less than the decision of the Spirit 
of Truth. This is God's supernatural provision for 
maintaining the gospel, which He has been pleased to 
reveal, without addition and without loss. To believe it 
is to believe that Christ has kept His word. He said 
that the Holy Ghost should guide the Church into all 
truth. This is the means which He adopted to sustain 
her in inerrancy. 

It would be the simplest of labors to show that the 
doctrine of the General Councils as the final and infal- 
lible organs of the Holy Ghost has been maintained by 
the great divines of the Church of England and by the 
few in America who have really deserved a title so 

1 St. Vincent, " Commonitory II, chap iv. cf Hammond,'' Chalc. 
Actv. 



lyS Religion for the Time 

exalted. Mr. Palmer quotes Field, whom I shall ask you 
to believe representative. *^ Concerning the General 
Councils . . . that hitherto have been holden we 
confess that in the matter about which they were called, so 
nearly and essentially concerning the life and soul of the 
Christian faith, and in respect of the manner and form 
of their proceeding, and the evidence and proof brought in 
them, they are and ever were expressly to be believed by 
all such as perfectly understand the meaning of their 
determination. And that, therefore, it is not to be 
marvelled at, if St. Gregory profess that he honoreth the 
first four Councils as the four gospels, and that whosoever 
admitted them not, though he seem to be a stone elect 
and precious, yet he lieth beside the foundation and out 
of the building.*' * 

It is also worthy of remark that in the great revolt on 
the continent in the sixteenth century the Reformers 
were quite at one with us on this subject. The doctrines 
and practices to which they took exception were not 
those which rested on conciliar authority. And many of 
them clamored for a General Council and all would 
have been willing to submit the topics in controversy to 
such a decision. Some will be surprised and, I trust, 
all pleased to hear the judgment of Calvin. '^ Thus 
those first councils, as for example, Nice, Constantinople, 
the first held at Ephesus, Chalcedon and others like 
them, which were convened for the refutation of error 
we ought unhesitatingly to accept and reverence as 
sacred; because they promulgated the dogmas of the 

I On the Church, II, 128-9. 



Revelation to all Ages 179 

faith. For they contain nothing except the pure and 
primitive interpretation of scripture, which the holy- 
fathers, with spiritual prudence, set forth for the purpose 
of breaking the ranks of the enemies of religion who, in 
those days, arose.'* ^ 

Many, however, will feel that the Councils at most can 
be held to have given us only the great Catholic Creeds, 
and the question will be urged — What are we to do in 
regard to the vast number of subjects, of fascinating if 
not of vital interest, on which no such declaration has been 
made ? I give you the answer in the words of that great 
writer who seems to have anticipated every perplexity 
which might at any time beset the subject. ^^ Take 
pains to consult and interrogate the opinions of the elders 
collated among themselves ; of those that is to say, who 
though living in diverse times and places yet continuing 
in the communion and faith of the one Catholic Church 
have been credit-worthy teachers ; and whatsoever he 
shall ascertain that not one or two only but all together 
with one and the same consent have openly, frequently 
and constantly held, written and taught, that let him 
understand it to be his duty, without any doubt, himself 
to believe." ^ 

It will be felt, and justly, that to come by one's faith 
in this manner would be an enormous undertaking, in- 
volving in fact the labor of almost a lifetime ; and if all 
this is necessary before one may even know what he 
should believe the man of active, busy life may well 
despair of even looking forward to the practice of 

1 Palmer, II, 129, note. ^ gt. Vincent, Comon. I, chap. ill. 



i8o Religion for the Time 

Christianity ! It is not as bad as that. This great work 
has been done for us and the result incorporated in a sim- 
ple and accessible form quite sufficient to meet the needs 
and guide the steps of the devout and earnest layman. 
For you will remember that it was to precisely this end 
that the revisers of the prayer book addressed their pains- 
taking and assiduous labors. The great and controlling 
principle which actuated the English Reformation was a 
return to the purity and truth of antiquity. Whatever, 
therefore, the revisers found destitute of the imprimatur 
of the early and undivided Church they refused to place 
in the translated service book, as being an addition, 
probably a corruption, brought in in later days. On the 
other hand it was their conscientious determination to 
embody in that treasury of the Churches faith and wor- 
ship all that the ancient fathers had received and held 
dear. It is evident, then, that the Church's faith and 
practice do not make unreasonable, much less impossible 
demands upon the time and intelligence of her people. 
She puts into their hands the book of Common Prayer, 
the noblest production of man, second in beauty, in 
truth and in the sympathetic appeal which it makes to 
the intelligence and heart of man, only to the inspired 
Word itself, and she says read, mark, learn. Study the 
offices, the catechism, the rubrics, the tables. You will 
become saturated with Catholic doctrine, you will be 
filled with the zeal and knowledge requisite to an holy 
life. You will have the truth as Christ gave it to His 
apostles and therefore when you seek to refresh your souls 
by quaffing at the sacred fountain of the words they 



Revelation to all Ages 181 

wrote your devotion will not be distracted by the dis- 
cordant meanings attached to them by those who *^ know 
not what they believe nor whereof they affirm*' ; but will 
soar aloft to be joined to the intercessions of our Great 
High Priest, because *^ ye have an unction from the holy 
one and ye know all things ' ' ^ — all, that is, that is neces- 
sary to your soul's health. ^ 

Yes, what we want in the laity of the Church is a 
spirit of loyalty to the Church. Not such a spirit as an 
ignorant woman once betrayed, when she said to a faith- 
ful priest — '* I have been reading the prayer book and 
find all these things that you have been teaching us. 
But the Episcopal Church was never properly reformed.'* 
No we want not reformers, but conformers. We want 
our men to say " This religion of ours was taught by 
Christ and has come down from Him to us. It is the 
revelation of God for our salvation. We believe it, we 
accept the whole of it, we will try to live it, we will do 
all we can to defend and spread it." 

We have been compelled to be very brief — so much so 
as, at some points, we fear, to have failed in clearness. 
Still we trust, that the main point has been grasped : 
that in asking a hearing for authority, we are but asking 
you to listen to the voice of God. It has reached us 
mediately, it is true, from the lips of man ; but the in- 
struments have been those appointed, originally by the 

' St. John 2 : 20. 

2 It is hoped that nothing in this paragraph will be thought to 
imply that the laity should not investigate and study. The op- 
posite is the writer's judgment. 



i82 Religion for the Time 

Son of God Himself and since His day in accordance 
with the laws impressed upon the society which He 
founded, and of which at least one conspicuous purpose 
was that *^ His words should not pass away/* It is 
evident that if God was to make a revelation to men, and 
conserve it through men, He could in no other way so 
efficaciously have attained His purpose. I need hardly 
say that it is inconceivable that He should have made a 
revelation simply that it might be lost or made of none 
effect by the vagaries and caprice of the degenerate will 
of man. 

I doubt not that I should be accused of cowardice did 
I not answer some of the more important objections 
alleged by really serious persons. It has been said that the 
fathers were very ignorant on many subjects upon which 
we are informed ; that we are therefore better qualified 
to render a decision than they were, and yet you ask us 
to accept their statements as infallible. What makes this 
objection even plausible, it seems, is that the individual 
fails to perceive the differentiating mark of revelation. 
This is that it is like our Lord Himself from whom it 
emanates ''the same yesterday, to-day and forever.'* It 
is then perfectly clear that the fathers might be destitute 
of a great deal of knowledge which we possess, as, for 
example, the heliocentric system, and still not thereby be, 
in anyway, incapacitated for their great work of handing 
on the one truth of the gospel. 

The most derogatory charge that can be made against any 
position is that it is narrow and the Catholic position has 
not escaped it. But what does the word narrow mean ? 



Revelation to all Ages 183 

The broadest man, I take it, is he whose mind is filled by 
the widest grasp of truth and his heart dilated by the 
warmest and most inclusive sympathy with it. But is not 
the ordinary acceptance of the word broad employed to 
describe one who finds himself unable to reject any posi- 
tion ? What was once said of Dean Stanley seems exactly 
to depict the popular conception. ** He was so consider- 
ate of the convictions of others that he was unable to 
arrive at any convictions of his own.** We have seen 
this is a situation in which the very purpose of mind is 
foiled.^ Surely we render the most effective sympathy to 
the man toiling and buffeted by the pitiless billows when 
we cast him a rope by which we may draw him on board 
the staunch and seaworthy vessel. We are not narrow 
because we shout to him that the deck is firm and the 
ship hastening towards the harbor. And the more it seems, 
are we really broad when we see millions toiling and 
floundering amid the discordant waves of individualism 
and able to advance no whither if we are able to 
point them to that position in which the minds 
of all ages have found satisfaction and the hearts 
of all sorts and conditions been elated with joy. 
And they have here attained this happy experience for 
two reasons. In the first place because it owes its origin 
to Him who needed not that any should testify of man, 
for He knew what was in man ; and besides it is Catho- 
lic — the meaning of which is universal, the very opposite 
of narrow. 

Another — as we think — misconception is that the 

I Super, p. 35 



184 Religion for the Time 

adoption of the principle of authority pronounces the 
doom of progress. It seems as if the precise opposite 
were the fact. Dr. McCosh criticised Kant's fundamental 
tenet by which he robbed synthetic judgments a priori 
of real validity by stating the obvious truth that unless 
you have truth in the premise there is no possible process 
by which it can be made to appear in the conclusion. It 
is manifest that this is equally true in religion. It is 
only on a basis of truth that you can advance to higher 
and more complex truth. What the great philological 
laws are to the science of language, what the axioms are 
to geometry, what the characteristic rudimental positions 
are to each department of truth, that the articles of the 
Creeds are to Christian doctrine. And we may well ask 
by whom and under what circumstances has the real 
progress which has been achieved in theology been made ? 
The first half of the fourth century enunciated in terms 
susceptible of but one interpretation the consubstantial 
divinity of Christ our Lord ; the second the true Deity 
and Personality of the Holy Spirit. The fifth age has 
fulfilled but three decades when the Incarnation — the real 
assumption of human nature by God the Word — has 
been set forth in language which guards it against all 
possible misconception. About fifty years later the integ- 
rity of that human nature, extending to all the charac- 
teristics which differentiate man, even will, is established 
by ecumenical decree. To come to more recent times 
the sixteenth century saw the Church doctrine of inspi- 
ration investigated and set forth, not now by General 
Council indeed, but by the labor and consent of her 



Revelation to all Ages 185 

great divines. The seventeenth addressed itself more 
particularly to the Atonement and our subjective relations 
to Christ. The eighteenth met the attack on miracles 
and set forth the Churches view of them both as evidence 
and a means of edification. In the nineteenth progress 
manifested itself in the grasp of the great institutional 
aspects of the Church and the love and mercy of God 
displayed in this accommodation to our infirmities and 
fallen state. 

Well may we ask what progress at all comparable has 
been made by those who have abandoned the kindly and 
efficient guide of authority ? Have they not afforded us the 
spectacle, entertaining it is true, of one great fish disport- 
ing himself in the sea of speculation, sometimes placid 
and sometimes lashed by tempest, till a greater or at 
least one more favored by the populace of the day has 
appeared and left nothing of him to be desired ? We 
wish to confine ourselves to an estimate altogether 
temperate. But have not the theological results of Prot- 
estantism been chiefly negative ? It is true that vast mines 
of information have been worked, much has been dis- 
covered and much also recalled to mind which was in 
danger of lapsing into oblivion. But what one truth of 
the gospel has it brought to light, or rendered stronger ? 
This service has been done others. It has been left for 
those who believe and know the truth to take the ma- 
terials which their industry has amassed and apply them 
to the elucidation and defense of Christianitv. God has 
made tlie wrath of man to praise Him and the remainder 
He has restrained. Authority is the condition of prog- 



i86 Religion for the Time 

ress in the apprehension and love of the truth of 
Christ. 

But what of the effect on the individual ? It is said to 
dwarf him, to take from him all incentive to the high 
exertion of his powers, to the development of his richest 
resources. I ask the evidence. Who that is familiar 
with the writings of St. Athanasius does not feel that his 
individuality is as strongly impressed upon his work 
as that of any author of this day — say in Germany? 
That instinct for the discovery of shades of difference in 
thought and that fine dialectical skill which drew ex- 
pressions of admiration even from Gibbon, do they not 
separate and mark him off from all other men ? Justly 
may we call him the Aristotle of the Christian Church. 
Or if St. Cyril be the father who for the time engrosses 
our attention shall the man appear lost in the mazes of the 
Faith which he is determined shall not be gainsaid ? 
Besides his genius for definition and his trenchant logic 
his magnificent philosophical imagination — which Mr. 
Tyndall would have delighted in — carries us above this 
world, and we follow him as he soars in some of his 
flights till we feel that he has exalted us to the very 
throne of God. The same gift exactly, only taking a 
Christian direction, which constitutes the peculiar at- 
traction of the philosophy of Plato, to whom he may be 
likened. 

It has been said that Socrates may be compared to a 
great lake out of which as by four streams the subsequent 
philosophical schools flowed. It is the picture of the 
great genius of St. Augustine, only he received in order 
that passing through the rich and varied waters of his 



Revelation to all Ages 187 

comprehensive mind, the faith and all its aspects, in all 
its power to illumine and console might inspire and re- 
fresh the ardent and the weary to remotest time. No ! 
we maybe sure that in Christ, *^ the fullness of Him that 
filleth all in all," every individuality may find scope, as 
no single specimen may hope to exhaust the plenitude 
which in Him dwells. That same power which dr^^sses 
the hillside in its green of a million leaves and at the 
same time makes each with its specific variation by 
which it may be discriminated from all others, and yet 
finds a place for each to develop and adorn will surely 
not crush but expand, not hamper but unfold the mani- 
fold gifts of those whom '^He is not ashamed to call 
brethren.** 

It appears that we may say with some confidence that 
the position taken in this conference is the only feasible 
basis of Church unity. We have heard now for a quarter 
of a century a good deal of talk more or less sensible, 
more or less inane, on the subject of the love of the dif- 
ferent bodies of Christians for each other and how they 
were on the point of throwing their arms around each 
other and indulging in the luxury of a lasting embrace. 
But somehow they never get beyond the point. It is to 
the great honor of our branch of the Catholic Church 
that she took the initiative in the great work, which we 
know must be so dear to our Lord*s heart, by issuing the 
quadrilateral and by many other eirenic measures. The 
fate of them all is not encouraging but is what might 
have been expected, what was indeed predicted by many 
discerning minds. Now, why? Lest I should seem a 



i88 Religion for the Time 

stirrer-up of strife in touching sore places in contem- 
porary wounds let me quote St. Augustine as he de- 
scribes the obstacles which prevented the return of the 
Donatists to the communion of the Catholic Church. 
'^How many, as we well know, were already wishing to 
be Catholics, having been aroused by the obvious call of 
truth, but out of respect to their friends, put off the 
giving offense to them from day to day ! How many 
were held not by truth, to which you have never trusted, 
but by the heavy bond of obdurate custom ; so that in 
them was fulfilled the divine statement, * a stubborn serv- 
ant will not be corrected by words ; for though he under- 
stand, he will not hearken ! ' How many, too, thought 
that the party of Donatus was the true Church, because 
their security made them torpid, fastidious, and tardy in 
recognizing Catholic truth ! How many ears were stopped 
by the tales of slanderers, who alleged that it was some 
strange offering that we presented on the altar of God ! 
How many, believing that it did not matter to what body 
a man belong, provided he were a Christian, remained 
in the party of Donatus, because they had been born 
there, and because no one compelled them to depart 
thence, and to pass over to the Catholic Church ! " ^ 

It is not till men are persuaded that the truth is to be 
found in the early and undivided Church that we may 
hope that our Lord's prayer ^^ that they all may be one '* 
will be realized. I am not insensible to the difficulties 
which stand in the way of so many in their advance to this 
conclusion. But it seems as if they might be open to 

^ Epis. xciii. 17. 



Revelation to all Ages 189 

the perception of these two facts. First that the time 
of the Reformation when the earhest of them took their 
rise was a period of perhaps unparalleled excitement, not 
merely religious but at least as much political. It does 
not seem extravagant to believe that many things done 
amid such circumstances would prove mistakes.^ And 
the other consideration, which seems not more difficult 
to receive, is that no one man is big enough, or ever has 
been, to take in the whole of Christianity. Perhaps 
St. Augustine is the broadest, largest man the earth has 
seen since St. Paul. But there are many of his specula- 
tions, some of them very dear to him, too, which we 
should be very sorry to be compelled to father. If this 
be conspicuously evident, then, in the very greatest, 
should it be regarded as derogatory to Calvin or Luther 
or any other leader of men in religious thought to say 
that he suffered from the infirmities of us all — that he 
adopted positions and inaugurated movements, which 
now demand revision and from which we should be wise 
to recede ? Which denomination of Christians has not 

^ Presbyterianism to-day a marked example. It is well known 
that for many years of his career Calvin had no intention of 
separating from the Church. When, however, he found it 
impossible to gain a bishop to his position he saw that he 
must either imperil the future of his system of theology or found 
the body which has since been known as Presbyterian. The 
latter thus appears as an afterthought to perpetuate his doctrinal 
system. His descendants have in recent years repudiated the 
main positions which are peculiar to their founder, but cling to the 
organization the sole object of which was originally to maintain 
that which they have thrown away. 



190 Religion for the Time 

already done one or both of these? And is it pre- 
sumptuous, is it not kind, in us to call their attention to 
the clearness of light and to the fullness of grace that 
they may attain by placing themselves on the apostolic 
foundation. 

We may sum up our conferences now in a very few 
words. We have seen that if we follow our minds they 
will lead us to God, if our consciences they will conduct 
us to our Saviour Christ, if we put our hand in that; of 
our Mother the Church we may serenely walk with her 
in the paths of certitude; for '< we have the mind of 
Christ/' 



FOUR ESSAYS 



By Rev. Arthur B. Conger 



ESSAY I 

THE ANGLICAN CHURCH AND PROTESTANTISM 

It seems as if the time had arrived when the Anglican 
Church was in possession of the data necessary to the 
formation of a judgment on Protestantism. By Protes- 
tantism we understand that movement which arose on the 
continent of Europe in the sixteenth century and had for 
its first exponents Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and their 
coadjutors. For a long time it is probable that the prin- 
ciples of these distinguished men were not fully compre- 
hended, — certainly not in their ultimate tendencies — and 
the countenance given them by the English Church may 
be in part explained by a motive which was at least most 
honorable to her heart. She hoped to embrace all who 
felt it necessary to renounce what they believed to be the 
errors and corruptions of Rome. To the accomplish- 
ment of this result she was willing to sacrifice anything 
that did not belong to the essentials of Christianity, as 
she tells us so often in sixteenth and seventeenth century 
documents, for the satisfaction of tender consciences. 
But if it appears to us that she had at the time much in- 
formation to lead her to a just estimate of these same 
tender consciences, there remains no doubt to us of the 
present day, who have seen their development and tasted 
their fruits, that they were in the beginning and continue 
to be a synonym for hostility to Catholic truth. 

193 



194 Religion for the Time 

The movement which we describe by its own chosen 
name, Protestantism, has passed through many phases in 
these three and a half centuries and they have been most 
marked in its original home. A most enthusiastic ad- 
mirer, Mrs. Ward ^ tells us that it has at last in the writ- 
ings of Harnack and his co-laborers assumed its final and 
permanent manifestation. It was natural she assures us 
that a great intellectual advance should proceed slowly, 
and at times suffer those cataclysms which Mr. Spencer 
has taught us to look for in the material world. But at 
last it is here, and we may hail it with triumphant delight. 
This apparently she does not fail to do. 

By the translation of Harnack' s monograph on the Creed, ^ 
the English reader is placed in possession of these ripest 
fruits from the tree of Protestantism, and that in a form so 
terse as not to task his patience, and so lucid as not to 
burden his ingenuity. The only amazing thing is that Har- 
nack takes pains to present us with the ^^ first gospel preach- 
ing " ; for he tells us directly in the case of one article, 
and indirectly in that of two others, that it could not be 
binding on the thinker of to-day. ^'If, however, this is 
their original sense the Churches of the Reformation 
were clearly bound to understand them in another. Still 
the fact remains that at the present day no one who un- 
derstands the original meaning of the clause [Commun- 
ion of Saints] accepts it in its first sense. He explains 
it in his own way precisely as he does on other grounds 
with the expression resurrection of the flesh. '^ * 

1 Nineteenth Century, March, 1889. 

2 Ibid., July, 1893. ^Ibid., p. 175. 



The Anglican Church 195 

It will be interesting to take a hurried glance at the 
final word of Protestantism on the subject of the Apostles* 
Creed. The following he tells us are included in that 
which *'does not belong to the first gospel preaching.'* 
The preexistence and eternal Sonship of Christ.^ His 
Conception by the Holy Ghost — it being represented 
that the Holy Ghost came upon Him for the first time at 
His baptism — and the Corollary of this the perpetual 
Virginity of Mary ; ^ the Personality of the Holy Ghost, 
and. as a consequence, *' Whoever therefore intro- 
duces the doctrine of the Three Persons of the Godhead 
into the Creed, explains it contrary to its true meaning 
and alters its true sense '* ; ^ and finally '* the resurrection 
of the flesh.'** 

We should be inclined, perhaps, to be alarmed by the 
confident statement, of one who confessedly stands in the 
first rank of contemporary scholars, that what the Church 
believes to be the pith and kernel of the Creed was not 
contained in its original announcement. For this is the 
only thing that to a Catholic is of any real consequence. 
But when we read history, we take courage. St. Atha- 
nasius tells us of the Arians that ^'no one sought to 
commend or demonstrate his heretical utterances from 
the text of Scripture. Moreover, formerly the most dis- 
graceful devices and specious sophisms were resorted to ; 
but now they venture to traduce the fathers." ^ 

We shall see before we are through that heresy is ever 

^ Nineteenth Century, July, 1893, P- 168-9. ^ Idid., p. 170. 
^ Ibid.^ p. 171. ^Ibid.^ p. 172. 

5 Newman, "Arians," chap, iv., p. 99. 



196 Religion for the Time 

the same, not merely in its contents, but its methods ; 
and when Satan appears as an angel of light, when 
heresy begins to reverence and to quote the teaching of 
the apostles we may be sure that there is our greatest 
danger, and also his last resort. 

We have already seen that Harnack is ready, follow- 
ing the Protestant churches, to reject the '^ first teaching *' 
if it should prove obnoxious to his own predilections. 
Let us therefore study the method by which he arrives at 
that to which after all he sits so loosely. 

The ''author's contention *' is ''that it is the privilege 
and sacred duty of Protestant theologians, untrammelled 
by considerations of favor or disfavor, to labor towards a 
clear understanding of the gospel, and openly to declare 
what, in their conviction, is truth, and what is not."^ 

Here, then, the first thing that we miss is that earnest 
desire and sense of solemn obligation to pass on the truth 
which Christ first taught to His apostles and then com- 
missioned them to teach. It is the conviction of the 
Protestant theologian of what is truth, and what is not, 
which he is openly to declare. And in doing this 
he is as has been said by another^ "not to be gov- 
erned by what Church doctors or even apostles 
have sealed with their authority, but which the facts 
themselves, critically weighed, appear to warrant.*' 
Professor Harnack is a great scholar, a careful student 
and we doubt not is imbued with a warm love of truth. 
But for his conclusions, we have no other guarantee than 

1 Nineteenth Century, July, 1893, P* ^54* 

2 cf. Pref. " Ecce. Homo." 



The Anglican Church 197 

his own opinion. And having seen that he does not feel 
bound by the utterances of the apostles, even when he is 
sure of them, it would not surprise us greatly were we to 
find that there was something in his environment, in his 
education, in his hereditary tendencies of thought, which, 
in short, constituted a Protestant bias and made him in- 
capable of correctly interpreting and reporting the <' first 
gospel preaching.*' And if I mistake not, this he ex- 
plicitly asserts. 

For he continues : ^^It is also their duty,'* /. <?., that 
of the Protestant theologians, ^'to speak on behalf of 
those numerous members of the Evangelic churches who, 
being sincere Christians, feel themselves oppressed in 
conscience by many clauses of the Apostles' Creed, if 
they are called on to recite them as their own belief. 
More than one way is conceivable by which the diffi- 
culty now pressing on so many Christians might be 
removed, and, within the Protestant churches, love and 
common faith will certainly in time discover the right 
way."^ It was, we see, a predetermined necessity that 
these clauses, which to our mind constitute almost all 
there is in the Creed which makes a Revelation worth 
while, should be found wanting in the first preach- 
ing ; therefore they were. No otherwise could the 
Protestant theologian perform his ''sacred duty." But 
now what is the process ? I quote from an enthusiastic 
and sympathetic admirer, Mrs. Humphrey Ward. "All 
this was brought about by nothing in the world 
fundamentally but improved translation^ by the use of 

^Nineteenth Century, July 1893, P- i54' 



198 Religion for the Time 

that same faculty, half-scientific, half-imaginative. . . . 
Oh, the subjective element, of course, is inevitable to 
some degree or other. But, in truth, paradox as it may 
sound, it is just this heightened individuality in the 
modern historian which makes him in many ways a bet- 
ter interpreter of the past. . . . He understands the 
past better, because he carries more of the present into it 
than those who went before.*' * 

1 am aware that I have not quoted consecutively or at 
length enough to do justice to Mrs. Ward's thought with 
which in great part I agree. But suppose that the '^ sub- 
jective element,*' and the ''heightened individuality," 
''the present which one carries into the past," obscures 
or totally darkens the past ; so that it is they and not // 
which the scholar perceives ? What then becomes of his 
reliability as a reproducer of the past ? This is precisely 
the accotmt which Professor Swete gives in a documentary 
refutation, which states the Christian position in a man- 
ner most satisfactory and clear. " Professor Harnack 
brings to his study of sub-apostolic writers a precon- 
ception which to his own mind has assumed the dimen- 
sions of a historical fact." ' Professor Harnack tells us that 
the personality of the Holy Ghost " was still unknown to 
most Christians by the middle of the fourth century."' 
In answer to this Dr. Swete simply asks, "What were the 
influences, or where is the writing, to which the Church 
owed her conversion to the doctrine of the personality of 

1 " Agnosticism and Christianity," p. 290. 

2 « Apostles' Creed," H. B. Swete, D. D., p. 28. 

3 Nineteenth Century, July, 1893. 



The Anglican Church 199 

the Holy Ghost/' ^ *' It is remarkable that this vital alter- 
ation in the faith*' — the introduction of the doctrine of 
the Three Persons of the Godhead, — ''was not followed 
by an alteration in the Western Creed. ... It may 
be with some confidence assumed that this would have 
been done if there had been the least consciousness on 
the part of the Western Church that she had executed 
the change of front imputed to her." 2 go Harnack's 
treatment of the Virgin-Birth Dr. Swete shows ^ is 
the creature of his ''individuality." The testimony 
of the documents is different. We cannot refrain 
from adducing an instance which seems to us very 
extraordinary. He quotes Rom. i : 4, as showing that 
all the Godhead our Lord possessed, He received through 
the descent of the Holy Ghost at His baptism. Whereas 
there is not an early writer who does not tell us that this 
interpretation of the text was an expedient adopted by 
heretics to confirm their view. 

The only shadow of plausibility which the declarations 
of Harnack possess is derived from his failure to dis- 
criminate in two important domains. He reads the New 
Testament, Justin Martyr and St. Ignatius as precisely 
on a par with the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd 
of Hermas, unless, perhaps, in certain instances he gives 
the latter the preference. St. Paul tells us " there must 
be heresies among you, that they which are approved 
may be made manifest." There were not only partial 
views, but false ones held in the Apostles' time. But 

1 " Apostles' Creed," p. 36. 2 /<^/^., p. 37. 

3 Ibid., pp. 43-55. 



200 Religion for the Time 

while the Apostles lived, their voice was sufficient to pro- 
nounce on heresy ; and after their death, their writings, in- 
terpreted by the faith which they once for all delivered, 
was the instrument in the hands of the Holy Ghost by 
which the Church was preserved from error. What 
Harnack is bound to show, therefore, is not that this or 
that view was advanced in the early age of the Church, 
but that it was recognized as an integral portion of the 
faith. We opine that it will cause him some little labor 
to prove, in the light of this canon, that the doctrine of 
the Three Persons of the Godhead does not belong to the 
first preaching of the gospel. 

The other source of confusion by which the ordinary 
reader might be misled is Harnack's failure to grasp the 
fact and the doctrine of development in the compre- 
hension of truth by the Church. St. Vincent places 
them before us with his usual masterly clearness^ 
''Let posterity thank thee for understanding that 
which antiquity without understanding revered. Yet 
that which thou hast learned, so teach, that when 
there is novelty in thy expression there may be 
none in thy doctrine.'* It is true that the language of 
the Creed changed. Why? Because the exigencies of 
heresy rendered it expedient or imperative.^ But the 
doctrine, the thought conveyed, there was no variation in 
that. 

1 Com. xxii. 

2 The difficulties of the Church in arriving at correct nomen- 
clature are illustrated by Dr. Newman, "Arians," Chap, ii., 
Sec. IV. 



The Anglican Church 201 

Allowing, therefore, for the fact that God tried the 
fideHty of the first age of the Church as He has His chil- 
dren in all ages, ^ and that the Church's grasp of truth 
increased in clearness as different phases and relations of 
it were forced on her consideration we cannot but be- 
lieve that the ^* subjective element" and not any new 
light upon the subject is responsible for the negative con- 
clusions in Harnack^s Apostles' Creed. 

This will, of course be admitted, at least in part, by 
his admirers. It will also be justified by them. They 
will assure us that a flood of light has been poured 
upon the literature of the first centuries within the last 
hundred years. Harnack is master of all this wealth of 
information. He is in a better position to determine 
what is the truth on all these questions than any prede- 
cessor of his. There may be many who cannot be driven 
from this position. In that case I simply wish to show 
that there is nothing new in the contention, but that it has 
been the characteristic claim of heretics from the earliest 
ages. Suppose we take hold of the chain and by it 
draw ourselves back to the place where it seems to be 
anchored. We have often heard it affirmed that Turre- 
tin was better equipped to announce the truth than St. 
Augustine. Well, in the interval there were truths in 
certain departments brought vividly into the light.- Let 
us go back further till we find Nestorius arrayed against 
the Faith. What reason does he allege? The people 
*'are blinded as to the dogma of the knowledge of God. 
But this is not the fault of the people, but how shall I 

> Deut. 13 : 1-3. 



202 Religion for the Time 

say it courteously? [we can hardly wonder at his mis- 
givmg] that the teachers had not opportunity to set 
before you aught of the more accurate teaching.*' ^ The 
tone of the leader, if we may trust St. Vincent, ' 
was very soon adopted by his subalterns. ''For 
you shall hear some of them say, ^Come, O ye 
simple and pitiable, who are commonly called Catholics, 
and learn the true faith, which none beside us under- 
stand, which has been hidden from many ages past, but 
has lately been revealed and shown.' " However we 
have seen that the Church proceeded gradually to take 
possession of her rich heritage of truth, and it may be 
that some will sympathize with Nestorius and the co- 
horts in his train. So let us go back to St. Irenaeus. 
And I think that we may ratify his judgment: "It 
never can be right to say that they [the apostles] 
preached before they had perfect knowledge; as some 
venture to say, boasting themselves to be correctors of 
the apostles."^ We do not believe that it will be 
contended that there was much room for change in 
the period which elapsed between the death of the 
apostles and the writings of this saint — St. Polycarp 
being the single link which connects him with St. John. 
But at its fountain head we learn the true character of 
the stream. We seem to see clearly that objectors to the 
Catholic Faith in whatever age are " correctors of the 
apostles." St. Irenseus tells us of the immense care 
which the Church had taken faithfully to hand on the 

1 Pref. XLVIII, St. Cyril Incarn. Oxford Tr. 

2 Common, xxi. ^Iren. 3: il. 



The Anglican Church 203 

deposit, and gives us as a guarantee of her success the 
absolute uniformity of her teaching in all parts of the then 
known world. The heretics of his day, and for many a 
long day after, appear not to have disputed this. Harnack, 
however, does. He describes it as a ^^ period which gave 
birth to much that the Church of the Reformation has 
rejected.'*^ Whichever, therefore, you believe, whether 
the heretics of St. Irenseus' day or those — I beg his 
pardon, I mean Dr. Harnack — the result is the same. 
Christ tried to give the world His religion, but failed ; 
through the feebleness of His instruments indeed, but 
still the instruments which He Himself chose and 
equipped, and for the efficiency of which, therefore. He 
is responsible. If we accept the statement of the con- 
temporaries of St. Irenseus, the mistake was quite soon 
discovered and remedied ; if, however, we pin our faith 
to Harnack, not until the present day. 

Had we pressed our catena one step further back to the 
very days of the apostles, we should have found those 
same gentlemen with their '^ subjective element" in 
very great prominence indeed. And we feel that it may 
be well for all parties concerned to recall the manner in 
which they were met by a great apostle. *'What! 
came the Word of God out from you ? Or came it unto 
you only ? If any man think himself to be a prophet or 
spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I 
write unto you are the commandments of the Lord ''^ 

It will, perhaps, be felt that in selecting Professor 
Harnack as the representative of the developed thought 

1 Nineteenth Century, July, 1893, P* '^7' * ^ ^^r- H* 3^S, 



204 Religion for the Time 

of Protestantism injustice has been done to a large class 
of thinkers who deplore the results at which he has 
arrived.^ 

We wish to be entirely fair. Upon what name in the 
present century could we fix which would be agreed upon 
as the most conservative and orthodox in German the- 
ology P^ Would not the vast majority of those familiar 
with the subject give their suffrages in favor of Dorner ? 
We have time but for a single instance. Upon what 
doctrine shall the test be made ? We shall not follow 
our own predilection, which might be biased, but will 
commit the resolution of the question to one so compe- 
tent as St. Leo is acknowledged to be. '* Having re- 
viewed,'' he tells us, ^^the opinions of well-nigh all 
misbelievers — opinions which even rush into a denial of 
the Holy Spirit — we are assured that hardly any one has 
gone astray unless he has failed to believe the reality of 

* While we are writing the following press report comes to 
hand: 

" Washington, Oct. 22, 1896. — More than a thousand leaders of 
the Unitarian Church were gathered in Mezerrott's Hall to-day 
when the National Conference of the Unitarian and other Christian 
Churches was called to order by Dorman B. Eaton of New York, 
The Rev. Frederick L. Hosmer, of St. Louis, read a paper by Dr. 
Edward Everett Hale, of Boston, on 'Our Congregational 
Polity.' Dr. Hale gave an extended historical resume of the 
growth of Congregationalism and its gradual evolution in Uni- 
tarianism." 

* We say Germany theology because we know of no writer of 
the age outside of Germany who has made a real impression on 
Protestant thought. 



The Anglican Church 205 

two natures in Christ, and at the same time to acknowl- 
edge one Person.** ^ The Incarnation, then, may be re- 
garded as absolutely crucial. It so happens also that 
Dorner's great strength was devoted to the consideration 
of this subject. What has he to say ? '^ On his [Cyril's] 
view, therefore Christ was simply God with the appear- 
ance of a man, but not a real man : and consequently he 
did not arrive at a real Incarnation of God," ^ This ut- 
terance is sufficiently astonishing in the light of the fact 
that St. Cyril was the man selected in the Providence of 
God to determine the Church's statement of that which 
had been taught her by her Lord. But it is not more sur- 
prising than Dorner's own explanation of its meaning. 
After stating what in his judgment is the defect of St. Cyril's 
view, which to be precise is that he does not resolve the 
mystery, he proceeds, <^ Plainly, however, the humanity 
of Christ could not then have been conceived as imper- 
sonal or selfless, as a mere attribute of the incarnate 
Logos, without immanent laws of development of its 
own, and without freedom. For the realization of the 
objects towards which his efforts were directed, C)Til 
needed exactly that element of truth which was main- 
tained by Nestorius, but overlooked by himself. He 
fancied that the incarnation was the more worthily esti- 
mated the more exclusively it was regarded as the sole 
act of God, forgetting that the Logos would have served 
no end by His Act of Incarnation, if he had not posited 
an actual man, the true man who, whilst man, is at the 

^ St. Leo. ** Incarn. Bright.," p. 22. 

2 Pers. of Christ. Div. II, Vol. I, p. 73, Clark's For. Theol. Lib. 



2o6 Religion for the Time 

same time God, and not a mere opyavov of God, what- 
ever ingenuity and similarity to man might characterize 
its system of powers or susceptibilities. " ^ Dorner be- 
sides criticises St. Cyril's illustrations of fire and 
iron, and sun and light, which it has always seemed 
to us he did not understand, and gives his adherence to 
the old thread-bare objection of materialism which we 
can think no less than puerile, and would have supposed 
precluded to any intelligent mind by the perspicuous 
phrases of the saint. 

The fact seems to be that there has been a revolt in 
Germany, for more than a century — our real opinion is 
for more than three — against the Chalcedonian Chris- 
tology. The argument has been this : Intelligence, will 
and objective existence are the criteria of personality. 
Our Lord's human nature seemed to possess all these. 
Therefore, in some way or other. He must have had an 
human person. The Communicatio Idiomatum afford 
no satisfaction to this class of writers. 

St. Cyril, as Dorner most truly tell^ us, thought it 
reverent to relegate this whole class of phenomena to the 
domain of mystery — '^the things which belong unto the 
Lord our God,'' — but these investigators cannot brook 
the idea that a veil obscures some truths, which it has 
not pleased God to draw aside, which their keenest vi- 
sion cannot penetrate ; and Dr. Dorner does not seem to 
be materially different from the others. The truth 
is that the position of Pfleiderer is the logical goal of 

iPers. of Christ. Div. II, Vol. I, pp. 70-1 Clark^s For. Theol. Lib. 



The Anglican Church 207 

Protestantism. His own term is an '* ethical re- 
ligion," the meaning of which is that we have no 
truth but such as our own reason has brought us, 
and no strength except that which our own wills can 
be induced to exert at the solicitation of that 
truth. 

It seems almost a pity that the warning thrown out 
over a hundred years ago, by one so little friendly to us 
as Gibbon, was not more seriously received. Speaking 
of the work of the Protestant doctors in the sixteenth 
century, he says: ** Their arguments and disputes were 
submitted to the people, and their appeal to private 
judgment was accepted beyond their wishes, by curiosity 
and enthusiasm. Since the days of Luther and Calvin a 
second reformation has been silently working in the 
bosom of the Reformed Churches ; many weeds of prej- 
udice were eradicated ; and the disciples of Erasmus 
diffused a spirit of freedom and moderation. . . . 
The volumes of controversy are overspread with cob- 
webs : the doctrine of a Protestant Church is far removed 
from the knowledge or belief of its private members ; 
and the forms of orthodoxy, the articles of faith, are sub- 
scribed with a sigh, or a smile, by the modern clergy. 
Yet the friends of Christianity are alarmed at the bound- 
less impulse of inquiry and skepticism. The predictions 
of the Catholics are accomplished. The web of mystery 
is unravelled by the Arminians, Arians and Socinians, 
whose numbers must not be computed from their separate 
congregations ; and the pillars of Revelation are shaken 
by those men who preserve the name without the sub- 



2o8 Religion for the Time 

stance of religion, who indulge the license without the 
temper of philosophy '* ^ 

At the Council of Seleucia 359, Leonas read a paper 
which expressed the particular phase of heresy to which 
he desired to give vogue. Sophronius, a bishop of 
Paphlagonia, heard it to the close. His criticism was 
both terse and instructive. He said, ^'If we daily re- 
ceive the opinions of individuals as canons of the faith, 
we shall only fail in arriving at truth." ^ The first clause 
of the sentence seems to describe the demand of 
Protestantism, and the second to apprize us of the fate 
which awaits us if we accede to that demand. 

Mrs. Humphrey Ward devotes a considerable portion of 
her paper on '* The New Reformation,*' ^ to the effort of 
showing that the principles, which in this paper we regard as 
the constituents of Protestantism, are widely received in the 
English Church. It seems as if she failed to distinguish a 
legitimate criticism from what we cannot but regard as the 
arrogant claim of right to reject integral portions of di- 
vine Revelation ; and in this way broadens her charge to 
an extent that an accurate judgment will not maintain. 
But, restricted by this limitation, no one will for a mo- 
ment dispute the justice of her statement. It therefore 
becomes necessary to account for the condition of things 
within our own fold, and to point out the safeguard, if 
any exists, by which we may hold the evil in check, or, 
if possible, eradicate it. 

Alexander, the eminent Archbishop of Constantinople 

1 «* Dec. and Fall," chap. liv. finem. 2 Soz. Bk. IV, Chap. xxii. 

3 Nineteenth Century, March, 1889. 



The Anglican Church 209 

in the second quarter of the fifth century, when at the 
point of death, was asked by his clergy who he wished to 
succeed him in his office. '^If,*' repUed he, " you seek 
a good man and one who is apt to teach, you have Paul. 
But if you desire one who is conversant with public 
affairs, and able to confer with rulers, Macedonius is in 
these respects, more qualified than Paul.*'^ I think we 
have here placed before us, in very vivid colors, the two 
types of men who have, in all ages, attained eminence 
in the Church, and who are necessary to her well-being. 
But special dangers attend the predominance of either. 
St. Paul directly tells us that the gifts of prophecy and teach- 
ing are different from that of government, while all are 
gifts of the Spirit. ^ Confusion and difficulty seem to arise 
when the individual who has been blessed by God with one 
gift, undertakes to exercise another gift which it has pleased 
God to deny him. Or perhaps we shall more accurately 
state the fact if we say that the mistake arises when the 
individual on whom God has bestowed one gift is de- 
ceived by the supposition that he is therefore in posses- 
sion of the whole twelve Charismata. We remember 
very well that when Macedonius wandered from his ap- 
propriate sphere into that of pronouncing on doctrine, 
he fell into the error of denying the existence, as a Per- 
son, of the great source of those gifts with which he was 
so conspicuously endowed. 

Now from the nature of the case, and yet to the great 
misfortune of the Church, laymen will, at least, on a 
superficial presentation, generally — I had almost said 

^Soz. Ill, 3. 2 I Cor. 12: 27-30. 



210 Religion for the Time 

always — sympathize with the views of the active as dis- 
tinguished from the intellectual leaders in ecclesiastical 
affairs. The reason is obvious. Their life and training 
fits them thoroughly to understand and sympathize with 
the one; and, as much, disqualifies them for entering 
into the views of the other. No clearer instance of this 
can, perhaps, be cited than Constantine's letter to Alex- 
ander and Arius on the first enunciation of the heresy of 
the latter.^ The Emperor is incapable of appreciating 
the Archbishop's sense of responsibility for training 
his people, and particularly his clergy, in the truth 
of the gospel of which he had been put in trust. Not 
less to him than to Gibbon did the controversy seem 
a senseless logomachy on a subject on which one 
opinion was as good as another, for all opinions were 
idle. Alexander and Arius were one just as much 
in the wrong as the other. Their only duty, there- 
fore, was to shake hands and make it up. He says — 
** Wherefore let an unguarded question, and an incon- 
siderate answer, on the part of each of you, procure 
equal forgiveness from one another.** However, to Con- 
stantine's mind the matter would have worn an entirely 
different aspect had the dispute been about a practical 
question; as, for instance, one of morals or ritual, in- 
stead of concerning the very Being of God. ''No cause 
of difference," he observes, *'has been started by you 
bearing on any important precept contained in the law, 
nor has any new heresy been introduced by you in con- 
nection with the worship of God, so that nothing exists 

1 Soc. Eccl. Hist. I, vii. 



The Anglican Church 211 

to hinder association in communion." He proceeds to 
recommend to them the example of philosophers who 
''although they may differ in their views on the very 
highest branches of science, yet in order to maintain the 
unity of their body, they still agree to coalesce.'* We 
are aware that later the Emperor changed his ground ; 
but we have seen no reason to think that it was because 
of the truth of the Catholic position. We are convinced 
of the justice of the view that Constantine, to the last, 
looked upon Christianity as a great engine for the unifica- 
tion of the Empire ; and that what investigation per- 
suaded him of was, not the inviolable truth of the 
Consubstantial Trinity; but that unless he threw the 
great weight of his influence in favor of the Catholics, he 
would rend and perturb the state by factional strife. 
However this last may be, will we not be borne out by 
those who have given reflection to the subject, in consid- 
ering Constantine' s attitude towards the Arian controversy 
representative of that of the lay mind in respect to 
strictly theological questions ? The impression upon the 
writer on first reading the Emperor's letter was that it 
might have appeared in one of our leading Reviews, from 
the pen of almost any of the popular writers of to-day. 

We have seen that clergymen, sometimes bishops, and 
those, too, of high gifts and influence, express themselves 
in similar terms. This accounts for whatever dissemina- 
tion the doctrines of Protestantism have received among 
us. The question which, in our judgment, the Church 
must answer with her very life is — how shall these 
vagaries of individuals as distinguished from the 



212 Religion for the Time 

Church's faith be banished from her pulpits and treatises, 
or, at least, be prevented from obtaining a wider and 
firmer hold? The answer is by the Church falling back 
upon her ancient and impregnable fastness. ''Beloved, 
believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they 
are of God ; because many false prophets are gone out 
into the world. . . . We are of God: he that 
knoweth God heareth us ; he that is not of God heareth 
not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth and the 
spirit of error.'* ^ And the doctrine of the incarnation is 
ever the touch-stone.^ The view of Constantine did not 
preyail at Nice. Why? ''See,'* says Athanasius, " we 
are proving that this view has been transmitted from 
fathers to fathers: *' is ''that which from the beginning 
those, who were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word 
have handed down to us." ' Nestorius was condemned at 
Ephesus. Why ? St. Celestius' letter to him informs us. 
"In your letters you have given sentence not so much 
in respect of our faith as of your own self choosing to 
speak of God the Word differently from what is the faith 
of all.*'* In other words in the observance of the 
Vincentian canon, the Church is to find her safety. She 
is the custodian and witness to a final revelation. 
When statements of doctrine are rehearsed in her ear 
she has but one question to ask : Is it " evident unto all 
men diligently reading Holy Scripture and ancient au- 
thors;*' or, at least, is it consonant with, progressive 

1 1 John 4 : I and 6. ^ Jbid.^ vs. 2, 3. 3 Deer. Sec. 27. 

^Quoted St. Cyril, Incarn. against Nestorius, Oxford Tr., Pref, 
xxiv. 



The Anglican Church 213 

from, that exquisite treasure which she holds in virtue of 
that twofold guarantee of her inerrancy. She holds no 
man's person in admiration. Part of her duty is dis- 
charged in ^'casting down imaginations, and every high 
thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, 
and bringing into captivity every thought to the 
obedience of Christ.*' ^ If she is to exercise this high 
prerogative, she must adhere to the principles of one 
who, though he wrote long ago, reads as if he were 
warning us in our present emergency; because, I sup- 
pose, the dangers of the Church are ever the same and 
so are. the methods by which they are to be averted. 
Irenaeus having shown what the faith is and its certitude 
as coming from the lips of the apostles, says, '*The 
proofs, therefore, being so abundant, we ought no more 
to look for the truth elsewhere, which it is easy to obtain 
from the Church, the apostles having therein most 
abundantly deposited as in a rich storehouse, whatso- 
ever appertains to the truth. So that whosoever will 
may take from her the draught of life. For this is the 
entrance into life, but all the rest are thieves and robbers. 
Wherefore we ought, shunning them, with all diligence 
to love what belongs to the Church, and to lay hold of 
the tradition of the truth." ^ And as if to emphasize 
this thought as being specially important, he recurs to 
it in a later portion of his great work. '* Wherefore 
we should harken to those Presbyters who are in the 
Church; those who have their succession from the 
apostles, as we have pointed out ; who with their suc- 

1 2 Cor. 10 : 5. ' Bk. 3, Chap, iv, Sec. i. 



214 Religion for the Time 

cession in the Episcopate received a sure gift of the 
Truth, at the good pleasure of the Father: but the 
rest who withdraw from the primitive succession, 
and gather in any place whatever, we must hold in sus- 
picion, either as heretics and evil-minded ; or as making 
division, and lifted up, so behaving for gain and vain- 
glory's sake. But all these have fallen from the truth.*' ^ 
''They went out from us, but they were not of us, for 
if they had been of us, they would no doubt have con- 
tinued with us." ^ 

1 Bk. 4, Chap, xxvi, Sec. 2. 3 i St. John 2 : 19. 



. I- .i 



ESSAY II 

THE CHRISTIAN'S ATTITUDE TO THE HIGHER 

CRITICISM. 1 

' Without attempting an elaborate definition of criti- 
cism we may say that it is an attempt to arrive at the 
fullest and most perfect understanding of the sources 
from which the different books of Holy Scripture pro- 
ceeded, the circumstances in which they were composed 
and the purposes which in the divine intention they were 
designed to subserve. It will be evident to every 
thoughtful person that anything which contributes to this 
grand result in however insignificant degree derives, from 
that fact, an immense importance. Nothing is to be 
overlooked, no amount of labor is to be grudged, the 
very highest talents and learning are to be devoted to 
the achievement of this incalculably great end. History 
is to be searched, the treasures of language are to yield 
up their witness, the books themselves are to be com- 
pared with one another so that no ray, which would 
contribute to our clearer understanding or more accurate 
knowledge of God*s Word, has been permitted to shine 
in darkness. 

We hope that we have made it apparent that we desire 

1 A paper read before the Clerical Brotherhood of Philadelphia 
Feb. 28th, 1898. 

215 



2i6 Religion for the Time 

to take the broadest and most sympathetic position pos- 
sible to that great department of Christian evidences 
which is understood by the term Criticism, and which in- 
cludes the Higher Criticism which is our special subject 
at this time. But while we say this we feel compelled to 
throw out a caution. The Higher Criticism is an in- 
strument of such superb calibre and delicacy of edge that 
it can be used safely only within the limits of the Cath- 
olic Church. I know that this will sound narrow to 
those who have either rejected the doctrine of Ecclesia 
docens or have never made its acquaintance. But the 
patristic student will recall that the fathers lost no op- 
portunity to insist upon it. When heretics and schis- 
matics had the temerity to quote Holy Scripture in 
defense of a particular departure from the faith once for 
all delivered, or a special rending of the Body of Christ 
those great saints and doctors were accustomed to 
reply : *' The Bible ! where did you get a Bible ? Was it 
not the Church which first told you that there was a 
Bible ? Was it not to her that God gave the Bible, and 
did He not give her with it His Holy Spirit to enlighten 
her as to the meaning of the Bible ? *' However strange, 
I say, this language may sound in modern ears of a 
certain class, it is very familiar to the reader especially 
of St. Augustine. He uses it over and over again in 
controversy with the Donatists. Had this principle 
that the Bible is legitimately the property of the 
Catholic Church alone been rigidly adhered to we 
should not have to deplore certain aspects and re- 
sults of the Higher Criticism upon which we shall be 



The Christian's Attitude 217 

♦ 

obliged later in this paper to reflect with animad- 
version. 

It will be replied that upon my own understanding of 
the bounds and functions of the Church stand convicted 
because some of the clearest statements of the destructive 
criticism have come from the pens of Anglicans. We 
shall have a word to say on this subject later. For the 
present we content ourselves with remarking that they 
have not been originators, but have taken bodily what 
they already found prepared for them. We credit them 
with good motives. We doubt them not when they tell us 
they felt *' compelled for their own sake, no less than 
that of others, to attempt to put the Catholic faith in its 
right relation to modern intellectual and moral prob- 
lems.*' ^ The error of which they were guilty consisted in 
not duly pondering upon the earnest interrogations of St. 
Paul. '^ What concord hath Christ with Belial ? Or what 
part hath he that believeth with an infidel ? " ^ But while we 
say this we desire to acknowledge that great good has 
been done. Attention has been called to needed modifi- 
cation in the manner of stating certain details and we 
trust that a taste has been cultivated and a line pointed 
out along which Catholics will proceed to enrich our 
knowledge and strengthen our defenses of God's Word. 

Let us now proceed to a statement of the results at- 
tained by divisive criticism. 

J. E. is the oldest writer of the Bible as it now stands. 
His composition begins at Gen. 2 : 4, and embodies the 
remainder of Genesis and Exodus as far as the thirty- 

1 Pref. Lux Mundi. « 2 Cor. 6 : 15. 



21 8 Religion for the Time 

fourth verse of the twenty-third chapter. This was not 
written till Moses had been in his grave 600 years. D. 
represents the legislative portions of the Book of Deuter- 
onomy and was written 200 years later. All the rest of 
the Pentateuch which embraces the first chapter of Gene- 
sis, about half of Exodus, the whole of Leviticus and 
five-sixths of Numbers is the work of P. and was palmed 
off on the Israeli tish nation after the return from the 
Babylonish captivity, about ten centuries after the death 
of its reputed author. 

We can do little more in this short paper than sketch 
the principal grounds on which the critics base their 
view. In the first place there are the two names of God, 
Jehovah and Elohim. These are supposed to prove 
separate authors, one of whom employs one, the other 
the other. The consistent use of this criterion has led 
the critics into the greatest difficulties. The one name 
is used where we should expect, on this hypothesis, 
to find the other and vice versa. So the aid of no less 
than three redactors has to be called in to assist the critic 
out of the pit which he has dug for himself. It would 
seem to be simpler, at least, to adhere to the old position 
that the two names, as both their etymology and Scripture 
inform us, describe God in two separate relations— one 
to the world at large, and one to the souls, whether indi- 
viduals or regarded in the aggregate, whom He has 
called into covenant relations. 

Another evidence of a multiplicity of authors the critics 
allege in the repetitions of the narrative. Thus, for ex- 
ample, we are told that on two occasions Abraham fear- 



The Christian's Attitude 219 

ing that the beauty of his wife would endanger his life 
represented her as his sister. Here the critics are con- 
fident that we have two accounts of the same event. But 
knowing as we do the tendency of sin to repeat itself we 
say again that here it is more natural to believe the text 
of Scripture which tells us that at the court of Pharaoh 
Abraham bade Sarah say that she was his sister, and 
when again he was in temptation at Gerar he yielded in a 
similar way. 

We know how, when this style of criticism was the 
fashion, it was applied to all classes of literature. The 
attraction of it is that no limit can be placed to the 
number of authors to whom a book is to be attributed, 
but the inventive genius of the individual writer. I well 
remember when we were invited by one learned critic to 
find two authors in the Iliad. That was somewhat inter- 
esting. But when one after another, with insight in- 
creasing with exercise bade us discern the traces of 
more and more, till at last we were required to believe 
that an age, which we knew to have been upon the whole 
illiterate, had produced not less than fifty Homers, the 
critics themselves declined further to prosecute this im- 
portant department of research. And we are glad to 
know that the foremost exponents of destructive criticism 
have of late been pronounced in their utterances as to 
the error of relying on arguments based merely upon 
peculiarities of style. 

We come now, however, to an argument to which the 
critics hostile to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch 
attach immense importance. How can you believe, say 



220 Religion for the Time 

they, that a legislator drew up these separate codes for 
the government of his people within forty years ? To 
which the answer is — Easily enough if you take the 
sacred text as it stands. We have thus the '^ Book of the 
Covenant ' ' as the formal preliminary proposition of Al- 
mighty God to the Hebrew people. If they were not 
willing to accept that there was no use in going further. 
However they did accept it, and having done so it then 
became necessary that God should make further enact- 
ments to carry out the principles already announced and to 
bring the nation into such relations with the theocracy as 
would make religion the spring and centre of their entire 
life. If it be affirmed that you have provisions in Leviti- 
cus and Numbers which have in view a settled agricul- 
tural community, it is obvious to remark that this was 
precisely what was contemplated at the time. The Israel- 
ites were on their way to Canaan, and, had it not been 
for their sin, would have arrived there in six months and 
those laws would have come into immediate requisition. 
As it was they were condemned to wander about in the 
wilderness till the entire generation had passed away ; 
and then the leader, of whose presence and counsel they 
are to be deprived, issues a solemn recapitulation of the 
law, adds such enactments as are important to the 
changed conditions on which they are to enter, and tells 
them frankly what they are to expect both in the event 
of observance and disobedience of the law. 

I say this is all natural, and the difficulties which the 
critics find are for the most part those which the exigen- 
cies of their hypothesis create. For the rest they are 



The Christian's Attitude 221 

those which are incident to the lapse of time and other 
causes of our ignorance. Many things that in the be- 
ginning of this century were enigmas to the student of 
scripture have become, through the advance of research, 
perfectly explicable to us. So much so, indeed, that we 
are encouraged to believe that had we perfect knowledge 
all would be clear. 

However we will notice two objections that are relied 
upon by opponents to show that the traditional position 
is untenable. The first is the fact that during the period 
of the Judges the law was not observed. This proves, 
say the critics, that it did not exist. We must be ex- 
cused for expressing the opinion that this is a most extra- 
ordinary position for a sensible man to take. When, we 
would ask, was the law of God ever observed, or any 
other law for that matter ? Nobody doubts that murder 
is against the law of the United States. And yet the 
last census assures us that 10,000 murders were com- 
mitted within its territory in one year. It is true that 
the book of Judges shows and states that ^' in those days 
every man did that which was right in his own eyes." 
But these breaches of law are all shown to be such and 
are condemned as such. 

It is, however, when this objection is brought into 
connection with the theory of development, which is 
after all the present strength and charm of the destructive 
criticism, that it assumes giant proportions in the eyes of 
those who make it. The law could not have been in ex- 
istence at this time because the people were so debased 
as to be incapable of receiving it ; and God cannot give^ 



222 Religion for the Time 

a nation a law till that nation has arrived af a stage of 
development where it is capable of enacting it. How 
do we know that the people were so hopelessly debased ? 
First an assumption is made and then an argument is 
huDg on it. What gives the premise stability is not ex- 
plained. And in fact all the archaeological discoveries 
of recent years favor a degree of civilization which is 
fatal to the statement. 

The second clause of the objection seems to be char- 
acterized with not more acumen, if regard be had to the 
merely civil and ritual provisions of the law. If a 
moral enactment is intended we will admit the state- 
ment within limits. In that case I need hardly say 
that I would fall back on what I have just said. For 
example it is folly to pretend that you could not tell a 
bushman that when he had sinned he must take a 
bullock or some other piece of property that he valued 
and sacrifice it to God as an atonement. This is exactly 
what he has always done under the tuition of instinct 
and natural religion. It is evident that we might illus- 
trate indefinitely. It is also evident that a great system 
of ritual would be a most important aid as an educa- 
tional agent in the development of the religious grasp 
and growth of the people. Truths that would make no 
impression on their limited comprehensions if stated in 
words, being thus presented constantly to their minds in 
attractive pictorial guise, would in time be introduced to 
the understanding and finally be fully realized. And 
for this reason the law was signally adapted to an infant 
people, and we should antecedently expect that God 



The Christian's Attitude 223 

would give it at just the juncture which scripture tells us 
that He did. And so on the other hand an Israelitish 
precursor of those who in modern times tell us that *'it 
doesn't matter what you believe so long as your life is 
right*' might have been persuaded that it was important 
to believe in entering into covenant with God by circum- 
cision when he learned that the penalty for not doing so 
was death. 

The second objection is that which concerns worship 
in the high places, and offering of sacrifices beyond the 
pale of the tabernacle and temple and by those who were 
not priests. Here again the explanation of the narra- 
■ tive is all that we require. The instances where sacri- 
fices were offered by others than those authorized by the 
law are to be justified by the extraordinary circumstances 
which called them forth. It was an appearance of God 
or an angel whom He had sent to communicate a mes- 
sage or a revelation, as for instance, in the case of Manoah, 
which caused the piety of the individual so visited to 
manifest itself in sacrifice. It must be remembered that 
while the Old Testament dispensation was for the most 
part ritual in its character it looked forward to and was 
intended to prepare for the religion of Christ. As the 
time for His coming approaches the gleams of spirituality 
become brighter and more frequent. The critics over- 
look this function of the Old Testament on grounds that 
we shall consider later. They therefore see, in these 
evidences of the means which God employed to attain 
His end, only indications of the non-existence of the law 
which under ordinary circumstances forbade them. But 



224 Religion for the Time 

this is merely another illustration of their vicious method. 
The view which we have now presented is that which 
our Lord affirms. *' Have ye not read what David did 
when he was an hungered, and they that were with him ; 
how he entered into the house of God, and did eat the 
shew-bread which was not lawful for him to eat, neither 
for them that were with him, but only for the priests? " ^ 
Worship offered in the high places was a breach of law 
and is so represented in the narrative. Princes and re- 
formers from time to time took measures against it with 
more or less success. But the wickedness of the people, 
their superstition and desire to imitate the surrounding 
heathen caused them to return to the places of abomina- 
tion whenever compulsion did not restrain them. But 
indifference to law does certainly not argue its non-ex- 
istence. For example. The law of our Church is, '^ None 
shall be admitted to the Holy Communion until such 
time as he be confirmed or be ready and desirous to be 
confirmed.*' At a time when it would have been greatly 
to my interest to do so I went to my Ordinary and asked 
him if there was any way of going behind that rubric. 
His answer was an emphatic ^^no^ And yet we know 
that in a great many churches in our communion this 
law is openly broken;, and even in this diocese, which 
some of us like to boast of as the second in the United 
States, we have heard priests defend or explain away the 
breach. We ought not to be much surprised if a simi- 
lar spirit manifested itself, as scripture tells us it did, in 
the far-off times of Israel. 

iSt. Matt. 12: 3, 4. 



The Christian's Attitude 225 

We are somewhat triumphantly told that all the critics 
agree in holding the development theory of the composi- 
tion of the Old Testament. It seems to be pertinent to 
ask how long? Wellhausen published his book in 1878. 
Let us go back a century. It was about that time that 
Eichhorn developed the document hypothesis. Two 
separate sources of such a book as Genesis did not satisfy 
the imagination and inventive faculties of Vater in 1805, 
or of Hartmann in 1831. An indefinite number, increas- 
ing with the keenness of the perceptive powers of the 
critic, was demanded. This position was effectually 
demolished by the labors of Ewald and F. H. Ranke 
between 1823 and 1840. On the ruins which these 
gentlemen made, Bleek and De Witte constructed the sup- 
plement hypothesis between the forties and fifties. Ewald 
produced a system of his own. Hupfeld returned in 
great measure to the position of Eichhorn in 1853, though 
he subjected it to serious modification. Now this last 
phase has occupied the field for about twenty years — the 
period which a German theory can be relied upon to 
maintain its interest. We must be excused if we await 
the announcement with as much eagerness and expecta- 
tion as if we were in a barber shop, — '' next gentleman." 

Dr. Driver assures us ^ that *' critical conclusions . . . 
do not touch either the authority or the inspiration of the 
scriptures of the Old Testament. They imply no change 
in respect to the divine attributes revealed in the Old Testa- 
ment ; no change in the lessons of human duty to be derived 
from it ; no change in the general position (apart from the 

* Lit. O. T. Pref. viii, ix. 



226 Religion for the Time 

interpretation of particular passages) that the Old Testa- 
ment points forward prophetically to Christ. That both the 
religion of Israel itself, and the record of its history em- 
bodied in the Old Testament are the work of men whose 
hearts have been touched and minds illumined in different 
degrees by the Spirit of God is manifest.** That this 
statement is entirely sincere, I wish here to say, is my firm 
conviction. And I desire further to say that it is, on such 
grounds that I believe the adherence of members of our 
clergy to this theory is alone to be explained. But I wish 
with equal candor and emphasis to state that I think them 
mistaken, and I should like to quote Professor Kuenen as 
corroborating my judgment. He tells us that in comparing 
the traditional and development views — ^' The contrast 
is drawn between true and false prophecy, between divine 
revelation and Israel's natural development.'* ^ And pro- 
ceeds — ** Whoever sees that there is no chance of doing so 
(controverting the development hypothesis) has nothing 
left but to substitute the mediate for the immediate, super- 
natural revelation. If, however, he resolves to take that 
step, then he will, as it seems to me, feel himself com- 
pelled, as a matter of course, to go still one step further, 
and to seek for prophecy an explanation which lies beyond 
the traditional conception of revelation."^ One more 
quotation to avoid all possibility of misunderstanding. 
**What the organic, in distinction from the super- 
naturalistic view of prophecy, places before our eyes may 
in truth be called a spectacle altogether unique. The 
mechanical communications of God have disappeared, 

1 Prophets and Proph, in Isr,f p. 579. * ^ Ibid,^ 579-So. 



The Christian's Attitude 227 

and with them also the progressive unveiling of the 
secrets of the future. But in the place of these what a 
memorable development ! What a contest for the pos- 
session of the truth ! It is the earnestness with which 
the prophets enter upon their task, the sincerity with which 
they believe in Jahveh and in his moral requirements, 
which place them in a position, not only to maintain 
what has been handed down to them, but also to purify 
and elevate it. Thus they rise to the knowledge of what 
in ancient times remained concealed even from the wise 
and prudent.*^ ^ 

If the , critics themselves differ on such a fundamental 
point as whether or not their results assure us that they 
banish the miraculous from the Old Testament, limit 
prophecy to shrewd anticipation, and see no revelation 
but such an apprehension of truth as the human mind 
and conscience attained in a long course of training the 
necessity to decide falls upon ourselves. To assist us in 
doing so let us recall the outstanding features of the view 
we are asked to accept. J. and E. fell into the hands of 
one R. about 600 years after Moses. Two hundred years 
later D. was composed and touched up and woven into a 
continuous narrative by another R. And finally after 
the exile the document P. was prepared and in its turn ' 
received the advantage of such revision as seemed good 
to its appropriate R. 

There are only one or two things which we shall be 
able to call attention to in connection with this process 
out of many which would prove of very great interest in- 

1 Prophets and Propk, in Isr.y p. 574. 



228 Religion for the Time 

deed. One is that the Deuteronomic Law had no ex- 
istence till the days of Josiah. It was written by an 
enterprising individual who conceived that it would 
greatly aid the religious condition of the nation at that 
time, and placed in the house of the Lord where it was 
found and meant to be found. Here the Germans 
come out, I cannot but think like men, and acknowledge 
the fraud ; while the English declining to use language 
so harsh expatiate upon the good intention of all con- 
cerned in the transaction. 

The other incident I desire to remind you of is the ac- 
count of the tabernacle. This interesting structure, if we 
take into account the divine instructions as to its consti- 
tution, the offerings of the people and its final erection 
occupies nearly half of the Book of Exodus, and is inter- 
woven wdth the remaining three Books of the Pentateuch. 
The critics whose work we are now considering assure us 
that it never had any existence. It is all the composition 
of P. and proceeded from the amiable motive of inducing 
the nation, which otherwise it would have been hard to 
do, to devote themselves assiduously to the worship of 
the temple. This is the edifice of which the New Testa- 
ment says that Moses was instructed to make it after the 
pattern which God showed him in the mount. ^ 

In regard to D. the text tells us-r-^' Moses wrote this 
law, and delivered it unto the priests, the sons of Levi.'* 
'* And it came to pass when Moses had made an end of 
writing the words of this law in a book, until they were 
finished, that Moses commanded the Levites, which bare 

iHeb. 8:5. 



The Christian's Attitude 229 

the ark of the covenant of the Lord, saying, take this 
book of the law, and put it in the side of the ark of the 
covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there for 
a witness against thee/' ^ We need not multiply quota- 
tions. The Book of the Covenant is directly said to have 
been written by Moses ^ and every portion of the Priest 
code claims to have been directly communicated by God 
to Moses. 

We may sum up in the words of another ^ what must be the 
judgment of all sane men as to the reliance that may be 
placed upon the Pentateuchal records, if the conclusions of 
the development hypothesis are to be maintained. ' ^ These 
documents are not only at variance with each other in their 
statements respecting numerous particulars, thus invalida- 
ting each other's testimony and showing that the traditions 
which they have severally followed are mutually incon- 
sistent ; but they are besides very incomplete. Numer- 
ous gaps and omissions occur in each. Matter which 
they once contained, as is evident from allusions still 
found in them, is now missing ; how much it is impos- 
sible to tell. But what is more serious, the parts that 
yet remain have been manipulated by the various red- 
actors. The order of events has been disturbed ; events 
really distinct have been confused and mistaken for one 
and the same ; and narratives of the same event have 
been mistaken for events altogether distinct; statements 
which are misleading have been inserted with a view of 
harmonizing what cannot in fact be reconciled. . . 

1 Deut. 31:9, 24-6. « Ex. 24 : 4. 

8 Green, " High. Crit. Pent." 



230 Religion for the Time 

There is no way of ascertaining how far these materials 
have been warped from their proper original intent by 
the well-meant but mistaken efforts of the redactors to 
correct or to harmonize them.** In other words the 
scriptures are, on these principles, wholly untrustworthy. 

The next question which it would seem necessary to 
consider is the effect of these astounding disclosures on 
inspiration. It is difficult to see where there could have 
been any supernatural enlightenment or authority, unless in 
the last redactor. It is to be assumed that his pred- 
ecessors knew nothing of such an element, because they 
felt quite at liberty to cut and slash at their pleasure and 
to throw away vast quantities of manuscript which they 
decided to be worthless. Very well the final R. comes to 
his work imbued by the spirit of God. He conscientiously 
revises all, and adds such explanatory and connecting 
phrases as makes a continuous and intelligible narrative. 
And as a matter of fact, probably in ignorance and with 
the best intentions in the world, he has committed him- 
self to all sorts of statements and actions which to speak 
plainly are lies and frauds. But remember by hypothesis 
he is writing as the exponent and mouthpiece of God. 
I need hardly say to you that one cannot hold such a 
position till he has first rejected the doctrine of inspira- 
tion. And one can at least respect the Germans who 
come out frankly and say so. 

A question of not less interest seems almost logically 
bound up in the foregoing. It is what is the relation of 
these results of destructive criticism to the authority of 
our Lord as the Teacher of the world. It is a well-known 



The Christian's Attitude 231 

fact that He is recorded to have made more than four 
hundred references to the Old Testament. There is no 
discrepancy between His attitude to scripture on one 
occasion and another, and this facilitates our inquiry. 
It enables us to present His view by the aid of a single 
instance. We shall select the incidents of that first 
Easter evening. When the two at Emmaus had poured 
into His ear the sorrow and blasting of their hopes which 
had ensued upon His death, He bursts forth in reproachful 
remonstrance — ^'O, fools and slow of heart to believe 
all that the prophets have spoken : ought not Christ to 
have suffered these things and to enter into His glory ? 
And beginning at Moses and all the prophets He ex- 
pounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things con- 
cerning Himself.*' And later in the evening in the pres- 
ence of the company of the apostles, **He said unto 
them, these are the words which I spake unto you while 
I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled 
which were written in the law of Moses and in the 
Prophets and in the Psalms concerning Me. Then 
opened He their understanding that they might under- 
stand the Scriptures." ^ 

There are three things here which claim our attention. 
The first is that the terms which He employs are those 
in common use in the age in which He lived to describe 
the Old Testament canon as we have it. The second is 
that He definitively declares that He Himself w^as the 
burden of their contents. And finally that He com- 
municated to the apostles the key to the accurate knowl- 

1 St. Luke 24 : 25-27, 44. 



232 Religion for the Time 

edge of the Old Testament. What that inner and 
essential meaning of the ancient Scriptures is we must 
find in the inspired exegesis which the apostles have 
left on record. The gospel of St. Matthew is an in- 
stance. Every act and portion of our Lord's life is there 
represented as having been foreshadowed or directly- 
foretold by one of the ancient writers. The speech of 
St. Stephen, which became the inspiration of St. Paul's 
life and the model of his great oratorical efforts, has the 
same ground-work. And finally if one desires to see the 
view elaborated he will find it in Justin Martyr's first 
apology. We need not do more than state that it is 
identical with what is known as the traditional view. It 
is hopelessly irreconcilable with the teaching of the critics. 
The more thoroughgoing of them tell us that no prophecy 
of our Lord exists. 

We were told on this floor that Christ in the emergency 
of His teaching did not stop to correct the erroneous 
view of the Old Testament entertained by His hearers. 
If this milk and water statement of the subject would 
satisfy the conditions, there would, perhaps, be little ob- 
jection to it ; although we should then be at a loss to 
know why it should be made. But the fact is that it is 
wholly inadequate to explain any real aspect of the 
problem. It is admitted on all hands that Christ 
adopted and taught the traditional view. And if any 
one is inclined to doubt this let me remind him that to 
such straits have those been driven who desired to abide 
by the results of criticism and at the same time avoid 
forsaking Christ, that they have been obliged to fall back 



The Christian's Attitude 233 

upon an heresy, which was announced as something al- 
together fresh, new and unhackneyed ; but on acquaint- 
ance is recognized as our friend of some 1,500 brief 
summers who was condemned by the Church in the per- 
son of Paul of Samosata. With this interesting infant 
we do not propose now to be occupied. But we cannot 
avoid the remark that it is at least a significant omen 
that his sponsors have not yet learned to pronounce his 
name. 

It gives me pleasure to quote that truly great man 
Canon Liddon, and the more so as I see of late a 
tendency on the part of some, I cannot but regard them 
as superficial, to disparage him. *'But did He then 
share a popular belief which our higher knowledge has 
shown to be popular ignorance? And was He whom 
His apostles believed to be * full of grace and truth,* 
and ' in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and 
knowledge * indeed mistaken as to the real worth of 
those scriptures to which He so often and so confidently 
appealed? There are those who profess to bear the 
Christian name, and yet do not shrink from saying as 
much as this. But they will find it difficult to persuade 
mankind that, if He could be mistaken on a matter of 
such strictly religious importance as the value of the 
sacred literature of His countrymen, He can safely be 
trusted about anything else. The trustworthiness of the 
Old Testament is, in fact, inseparable from the trust- 
worthiness of our Lord Jesus Christ." 

It is possible that you think Liddon narrow. Well, at 
least, Kuenen is broad. You will perhaps be delighted to 



234 Religion for the Time 

hear him say the same thing only from the opposite point 
of view. *'Not, however, that we should on a priori 
grounds be obliged to assign to Jesus infallibility in the 
use of the writings of the Old Testament. 
With regard to the Divine Master also must the right of 
criticism be maintained. If . . . exegesis is a 
science and its method has only gradually been settled 
and perfected, then the possibility of exegetical mistake 
must be acknowledged in the case of Jesus also.*' ^ 

We have been told that one of the results of criticism 
is that we may now study the subject of the creation in- 
dependently of the Book of Genesis. It is very evident 
that the tendency of the whole movement is to emanci- 
pate us from the authority of the Bible on all subjects 
whatsoever. And the question may in all candor be 
asked, What is the effect on the religious life of the 
people at large ? It is obvious even to the cursory ob- 
server — Dr. McConnell to his credit admits it frankly ^ that 
there is a growing tendency particularly among men to 
forsake the Church on Sundays and to devote the day to 
recreation and sport. If you talk with them seriously 
you will find that they are convinced that criticism has 
shown the Bible to be a tissue of absurdities and false- 
hoods. They believe that there is no real basis for faith, 
and in the absence of anything settled and true they 
prefer to cultivate their physique and enjoy themselves, 
rather than puzzle their wits over the discordant con- 
jectures of clergymen, none of whom can offer them any- 
thing better than an opinion. I frankly confess that the 

i/V^., of Israel^ 547. 2 Philadelphia Press^ Feb, 20th, 1898. 



The Christian's Attitude 235 

people have my sympathy. If such were the conditions 
that were the only course for a sensible man to pursue. 
Scholars who are under the spell of a particular bias do 
not seem to see that with the authority of the Bible all 
certainty in religion is gone. But ask yourself the ques- 
tion how it can be otherwise and you will see at once the 
impossibility of rendering an answer. Say, for example, 
you assert the divinity of our Lord. Let some one ask 
you how you know its truth. You produce your reasons. 
He simply says, probably with entire candor, that they 
do not satisfy his mind. In the last analysis it becomes 
merely a question between his opinion and yours. To 
your mind the reasons prove Christ's divinity, to his they do 
not. On these principles no man could be condemned for 
the maintenance of any position on the faith or morals of 
Christianity. It is doubtless for this especial reason that 
God inspired the scriptures and gave them to the Church. 
We can then say to the individual, Here is what God 
affirms on the subject. To reject it is among the most 
heinous forms of sin. ^' He that believeth not God hath 
made Him a liar ; because he believeth not the record 
that God gave of His Son." ^ 

Now, although the mass of material through which I 
have been obliged to make my way has detained me a 
long time, I trust that I have made it clear why I demur 
when asked to accept the critical conclusions of heretics 
and schismatics. First because the results attained are 
preposterous. Let any man, who has not a theory to 
maintain, notice the straits to which this class of critics 

1 St. John 5 : lo. 



236 Religion for the Time 

are reduced in the Book of Joshua, for example, and he 
will be convinced. A word is taken from one manu- 
script or redactor here, a phrase supplied from another, 
and a word of explanation is thrown in by the compiler. 
All this to make up a single verse. No man can believe 
that any book was written in that way. When applied 
to all other literature it has proved an hopeless failure. 
And what has given it what influence it possesses in re- 
gard to scripture is not its intrinsic excellence, but the 
determination! of those from whom it proceeds to accept 
anything rather than miracles, prophecy, and direct 
revelation from God. Besides this it makes the Old 
Testament utterly misleading and false, and robs it of 
inspiration, unless as Canon Liddon says, ''there is such 
a thing as the inspiration of inveracity.*' It compels 
us to convict our blessed Lord of error, it undermines 
religion and piety, and it leaves us with no better guar- 
antee of truth than the passing utterance of the particular 
writer who is, for the time, the fashion. It has already 
had the period of popularity which has been allotted to 
cognate theories in the past in which to titillate palates 
clamoring for something new. Already the probable 
direction from which its ignominious overthrow will come, 
seems to be indicated. ''It is my conviction,'* says 
Fritz Hommell, "that Arabia itself will furnish us the 
direct proofs that the modern destructive criticism of the 
Pentateuch is absolutely erroneous. The age of Minean 
inscriptions runs parallel with that of the so-called code 
of the priests. If the former are as old as Glaser believes 
them to be, and the Arabian civilization . . . al- 



The Christian's Attitude 237 

ready existed at the time of Abraham, then the laws of 
the priests of Israel are also very ancient. The best 
proofs for the historical accuracy of the Old Testament 
traditions come more and more from without, from the 
inscriptions of the surrounding nations."^ We con- 
fidently expect Germany itself, within the near future 
to reject the development hypothesis; and the day 
is not far distant when to quote Wellhausen will be as 
certain an indication of being misled by the fascinations 
of a theory demonstrably false as it would be to-day to 
advance the positions of Strauss or Renan, by whom the 
whole infidel world swore in the day of their little brief 
authority. 

^Recent Researches in Bible Lands ^ Hilprecht, pp. 1 5 7-8. 



ESSAY III 

THE NATURE OF INSPIRATION AS APPLIED TO THE 

HOLY SCRIPTURES 

Before coming directly to the consideration of the 
subject it seems to be wise to dispose of three preliminary 
questions and so, by clearing the way, to facilitate our 
enquiry. 

The first of these is suggested by the very form of the 
question to be discussed. It implies that the spiritual 
operation resulting in the inspiration of scripture is 
specifically distinct from that which acts in the pro- 
duction of all other literature whatever. The poet, 
taking him as the highest representative of merely intel- 
lectual achievement, ^' appears only to develop naturally 
a germ of truth which lies within him, and to draw no 
new supplies of grace and wisdom from without.'* But 
when we speak of inspiration as applied to one of the 
writers of either Testament we refer to a supernatural 
action of the Holy Spirit upon his faculties from without 
in consequence of which his utterance became the Word 
of God. 

Our second preliminary remark concerns the purpose 
of inspiration. It was that the Church should have a 
permanent, infallible standard of appeal.^ It has been 

1 Cf. 2. Peter i : 15. 
238 • 



The Nature of Inspiration 239 

often said recently, on platforms and in reviews, 
that the authority of the Church removes the nec- 
essity for such a function of scripture. But it ap- 
pears to be plain that if the authority of the Church is 
to exercise that influence over the minds of men, and 
particularly over adversaries and enquirers, which is 
necessary to her performance of her sublime mission as 
teacher of the world, she must have that to which she 
can point and say this is the Word of God. It is true 
that she possesses the tradition of the truth. But what 
is to prevent that tradition from suffering corruption and 
change in its passage from age to age ? Certain it is that 
the Church found it necessary to give form and perma- 
nence to the tradition of truth in the Christian creeds. 
If this was forced upon her in regard to that which is the 
interpretation of the truth it seems to show that the truth 
itself could not have been maintained unless it was re- 
duced to writing. In the civil courts the decision of the 
judge is final; but then it must be rendered according 
to the law, otherwise it were a mere individual opinion. 
So the Church gives a final judgment on a particular 
doctrine. It is final because issued on the basis of the 
Word written about which she cannot be mistaken. It is 
not possible to conceive of God, doing that which is 
superfluous. The fact that He did inspire the Bible 
shows that He had an object in so doing; and the use 
which the Church has made of scripture shows what His 
purpose was. 

The third of our prolegomena is closely allied to 
what we have now stated. It is often set forth as an ob- 



240 Religion for the Time 

jection that men are asked to accept inspiration on the 
authority of the Church, and the authority of the Church 
on that of inspiration, and that within this vicious circle 
the entire claim logically falls to the ground. But this is 
totally to misapprehend the Church's position. She is in 
fact the only authorized teacher of the world.^ Truth 
was given to her by Him whose unique prerogative 
it is to be the Truth. When the individuals whom 
He had made His spokesmen were by His mercy to 
be delivered from their toils, He bade them commit 
their message to writing, that those who knew might 
always have it in remembrance. The genuineness 
of the books thus produced we are ready to prove by a 
process similar to that which attests all literature. And 
this is the appropriate sphere of criticism. We shall thus 
arrive at the conclusion that a particular book was 
written at such and such a time, and sometimes also we 
shall see that it was written by a certain individual and 
for a certain purpose. The Church had evidence at the 
time of the inspiration of the book and placed it on the 
list of the canon. In arriving at her judgment she had 
in the first place the superintendence of the ever-blessed 
Spirit of God, who having guided the authors of the 
books into the truth, also guided the Church to preserve 
the books uncontaminated. In the second place the 
Church had external marks by which to convince the 
men of the age in which a book was produced of its 
inspiration. These were miracles, the attestation of im- 
mediate divine power to the fidelity of God's messenger ; 

> St. Matt. 28 : 19, 20. 



The Nature of Inspiration 241 

and prophecy, the very impress of the divine mind upon 
the message. It was impossible therefore for the Church 
to be mistaken. 

We are convinced that the man who will make the in- 
vestigation will arrive at the conclusion which Josephus 
so long ago urged upon Apion. ^^ It is evident from the 
thing itself how we regard these books of ours. For in 
the lapse of so many ages, no one has dared either to add 
to them, or to take from them, or to change them, but it 
has been implanted in all Jews, from the very origin of 
the nation, to consider them as the doctrines of God and 
to abide by them, and cheerfully to die for them if neces- 
sary.*' ^ 

If it be alleged that this evidence is not conclusive, we 
frankly admit that it is not demonstrative ; and in this 
respect is precisely similar to the proofs of every other 
doctrine of our religion, it being the purpose of God to 
make every word of His part of man's probation. If 
again it be objected that this throws the whole burden of 
proof upon the Church and we cannot receive her testi- 
mony we must reply with St. Paul, ^^if any man seem to 
be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the 
churches of God.'* ^ You must begin somewhere. And 
we start with the authority of the Church. 

It will now be seen that we are far on the outside of 
that logical circle which was supposed at the beginning 
to have engulfed us in its maelstrom. The Church being 
in possession of the truth, and its authorized teacher, 
before a word of the Bible was written, tells us also in 

1 Quoted Eus. Ill, X. 2 i Cor. 11 : 16. 



242 Religion for the Time 

discharging her office as teacher, what the Bible is and 
what it means. She is therefore at perfect liberty to ap- 
peal to the Bible in defense of any truth, and, therefore, 
to uphold her doctrine of inspiration. The word written 
is the guarantee that in the course of ages her teaching 
remains the same. 

We have now demonstrated our right to draw from 
Holy Scripture the proof of that which has been finely 
called ** the immemorial doctrine of the Church of God.*' 
Let us therefore endeavor briefly to set this latter before 
our minds, and then seek such corroboration from the 
divine Word itself as time will admit. 

Whether we ask the Jewish teachers, or the fathers and 
doctors of the Church Catholic we get the same response. 
Inspiration is that supernatural operation of God the 
Holy Ghost upon the minds of the writers of the books 
of the canon in consequence of which it becomes God's 
message to man free from all alloy of human error. We 
do not intend by this that the agents of the Spirit in the 
production of the different books did not share the in- 
tellectual conditions of the time in which they lived ; but 
that in their official utterances they were rendered the 
infaUible spokesmen of the truth. The doctrine which 
we are endeavoring to represent recognizes in Holy 
Scripture an human instrument and a divine workman. 
It sees neither the one nor the other separated or opposed, 
but the two working harmoniously together, each in its 
appropriate sphere, and together producing that grand 
thing — God's truth for man's salvation. The doctrine is 
not that the Holy Spirit suppressed or overwhelmed any 



The Nature of Inspiration 243 

faculty or natural trait of the individual through whom 
He spake. On the contrary He chose the subjects of 
His different communications on the ground of their at- 
tainments, hereditary gifts, education and all personal 
characteristics which go to make up what we call their 
individuality. It was because each one possessed the 
combination of powers and temperament which he had 
that the Holy Ghost chose him rather than another to be 
the medium of the special communication by which he 
has been enabled to become a blessing to all time. And 
moreover in giving to the world the particular phase of 
truth which each author has conveyed the Holy Spirit 
employed and utilized each power, each attainment and 
the result of the manner of the fusion of them — all which 
made them the men they were. For instance the Chris- 
tian Church would sustain an irreparable loss were the 
epistles of St. Paul or any one of them taken from her. 
Now what we hold is that it was just because the apostle 
to the Gentiles was the man he was, with his training 
first in the Greek schools and afterwards at the feet of 
Gamaliel, with his fervid emotions and incomparable 
dialectical skill that he was able to write those epistles, 
to embalm those imperishable truths in characters which 
gleam with the light while they glow with the love of 
heaven ; and that it is in consequence of these very 
qualifications that it pleased the Holy Ghost to select 
him rather than any of his contemporaries, for the de- 
livery of those particular truths. 

While we have been seeking to make clear the func- 
tion of the human agent in inspiration we have virtually 



244 Religion for the Time 

stated the place taken by the Spirit of God. He in every 
case selected the messenger, as we have seen, because He 
saw in that individual the qualifications which would 
enable him to transmit that particular message to his 
fellows. He then descended upon the soul of His 
choice and enlightened and elevated each one of its 
faculties. He then exercised such a superintendency 
over the man's production that it was His message. 
The man you observe had written perfectly freely, and 
also naturally, by which I mean according to his char- 
acter ; but the Holy Ghost had condescended to make 
him His mouthpiece in the utterance of truth to his race, 
and that same Spirit had so guided him in the exercise 
of his mental processes that his writing became God's 
Word. 

In order to free ourselves from the danger of misunder- 
standing it is probably necessary that we advert to the 
distinction between inspiration and revelation. By the 
latter we intend to describe all those truths which 
whether from their nature or the circumstances of the 
writer required to be supernaturally communicated to his 
mind. Of this character are all predictions of future 
events, and all statements relative to the being and 
nature of God. It will be obvious to every reader that 
the Bible contains an immense amount which does not 
properly arrange itself in this category. All the historical 
portions, for example, and many ethical statements as in 
the book of Proverbs were certainly known to the writer 
or were accessible to him in the ordinary course of 
human research. But according to the Church's teach- 



The Nature of Inspiration 245 

ing on the subject of inspiration the agency of the Holy 
Spirit is not less necessary, or less actual in the trans- 
cription of truths or facts already familiar to the writer's 
mind than in the utterance of a prophecy or mystery. 
Here again the office of God's Spirit is to select the man 
who knows the truths or knows where to find them, exalt 
and influence his faculties to choose from the great mass 
of materials at hand just that, and only that, which He 
desires to be placed before mankind, for all time to come 
for its instruction in righteousness ; and then, when the 
author addressed himself to his work, to influence him in 
its performance to such a degree that the actual result is 
that which was contemplated by the Spirit. We have 
not begun to adduce the Bible in support of the doctrine. 
But we cannot refrain from pointing out that only on the 
grounds which have now been alleged could St. Paul be 
justified in saying as he does over and over again of the 
narrative of the Old Testament — ^^ This was written for 
our learning." 

Perhaps we shall gain in clearness if both quoting and 
following the fathers we introduce at this point a simile 
or two to illustrate the doctrine to which we have given, 
possibly, too bald a statement. All are familiar with the 
analogy of the wind and the player and the lyre, which 
undoubtedly suggested in the first instance by the word 
^£07r7j£v<Tro9, was first employed by Justin Martyr and 
afterwards by almost all the fathers. The figure in its 
etymological form naturally suggests the ^olian harp. 
The wind finds the harp ready for its action, it passes 
now gently, now with swift impetuosity through its 



246 Religion for the Time 

strings and produces now music sweet and low, now 
glad and boisterous like the shock and peal of an or- 
chestra. But the character, the timber as musicians say, 
of the music is dependent on the nature and constitution 
of the harp itself, and each instrument gives forth a dif- 
ferent tone — its own characteristic tone. So does the 
Holy Spirit in the writers of scripture, strike now one 
note, now another in the diapason of truth ; and in their 
combination we have that sweetest harmony — the music 
of the soul — which stills its passions and breathes hope 
and gladness into its darkest melancholy — all the prod- 
uct of the ever-blessed Spirit of God, and yet sufficing 
to meet our every want, because reaching us in the lan- 
guage and through the lips of men of like passions and 
like limitations with ourselves. 

Again to take a second illustration from our own 
human life. The organic principle in us has taken into 
union with itself certain particles of matter by which its 
manifestation is both limited and determined. We look 
as we do, we suffer or are in health, we are active or 
phlegmatic in consequence of that combination of spirit 
and body which constitutes ourselves. And yet the 
relative manifestation of the two in different parts of our 
body are very different. In one's hair for instance the 
vital principle is certainly and ascertainably present. 
But its phenomena there are so different from those ex- 
hibited in the brain that an inexperienced observer 
would be likely to pronounce them the result of different 
forces. So in the whole of Holy Scripture God's Spirit 
is the organic principle. He manifests Himself in the 



The Nature of Inspiration 247 

historical portions in a manner very different from what 
He does in the last discourses of our Lord. The differ- 
ence is so great indeed that the inexperienced — to carry 
out the analogy — recognize His agency here and refuse 
to find it there. But the Catholic Christian knows that 
it is equally in all parts ; exactly as the principle of life 
in man equally animates every part of the body. 

Here is another similitude drawn from nature which 
will aid in our grasp of a third aspect of inspiration. If 
you go into certain houses where refinement and taste 
find a home you will see in the early winter an ordinary 
plain looking bulb in a glass vase filled with water. At 
the expiration of perhaps a fortnight you will observe 
the brown covering of the bulb to crack and peal and 
finally to curl up and decay. Simultaneously a shoot 
will appear issuing from the top of the bulb which will 
grow into a graceful plant, and if all goes well late in 
January or in the early part of February will bear a most 
delicate and beautiful flower diffusing a sweet and ex- 
quisite odor throughout the apartment. Upon a super- 
ficial glance perhaps most people would be inclined to 
say that that slight and unsightly husk had no part in 
the development of the fragrant bloom unless perhaps in 
its decomposition to afford some slight nourishment to 
the growth which bears it. But the botanist will tell you 
that all through the summer months it has been the 
means of protecting the protoplasm, the germ of life, in 
the very centre of the bulb from the action of the atmos- 
phere which otherwise would have given it a premature 
and abortive activity. So we may say in relation to 



248 Religion for the Time 

Holy Scripture, '' The testimony of Jesus is the spirit 
of prophecy.'* He is the beautiful flower that in the 
fullness of time was manifested to the enraptured souls of 
God's people. There may be much in the earlier por- 
tions of God's Word which simply protect the revelation 
from the adverse forces which it necessarily met in the 
midst of this sinful world. But was it not a merciful 
condescension on the part of Almighty God to provide 
the protecting cerement and so to preserve the germ of 
truth alive ? 

We venture to submit that the phenomena of Holy 
Scripture when patiently and accurately weighed will 
confirm the view of inspiration that has now been set 
before you. We have not space to consider adverse 
theories as they have been ostentatiously, and we think 
presumptuously, called. We would simply suggest that 
each attempt of the kind has been rendered possible only 
by an undue exaltation of either the human or the 
divine element. In other words the projector of each 
particular scheme has proceeded upon a partial induc- 
tion. And I would offer in proof of this statement the 
incontestable fact that no one of them has been able to 
maintain itself in the presence of an enlightened criti- 
cism. It has only been necessary for them to be investi- 
gated. They have then been promptly abandoned by 
intelligent minds. We have also had theories of partial 
inspiration, but neither so do the witnesses agree among 
themselves ; and their combined testimony results in the i 

rejection of nearly the whole canon as uninspired. | 

Can the Church then successfully marshall the vast 



The Nature of Inspiration 249 

array of facts presented in scripture in proof of her 
doctrine ? Observe I do not use the word theory. For 
the exploiting of a theory I conceive the Church in the 
first place to be destitute of the materials and also to be 
relieved of the necessity. She is a teacher — Ecclesia 
docens. She receives and she transmits. Her business 
is with doctrine. Well, will the facts support the doc- 
trine ? We are not a little encouraged by the circum- 
stance that they have done so for now more than thirty 
centuries. 

We shall have time for only a glimpse at the immense 
mass of evidence. From what portion of this vast do- 
main shall we be likely in a few moments to obtain the 
most satisfactory results ? I shall ask you to allow me 
to seek them in the department of Prophecy which ap- 
pears to furnish the most available materials for the cor- 
roboration of the doctrine of inspiration. 

The Nabi in the sense of a foreteller of events is char- 
acteristically described in the Old Testament by the title 
Roeh, He is first of all a seer and that upon which 
Inspiration fixed his gaze is a vision. Now the character 
of the picture which he beholds is as near a reproduction 
of that which the divine mind from which the impulse to 
observe and also the materials beheld have come as it is 
possible for human faculties to entertain ; but every such 
recorded in Holy Scripture bears also upon its face the 
limitations of the human medium through which it has 
passed. 

The particular fact to which I wish here to call attention 
is this. The special phase of God's infinity which we de- 



250 Religion for the Time 

scribe by the term omniscience means that all knowledge 
and all events lie open and clear before His mind. He 
sees all in their exact relations. He places the vision of 
a certain section of those events which it is His pleasure 
at that time to reveal to man before the intelligence of a 
prophet exactly fitted by nature and education — I should 
prefer to say Providence — to discern it. And now as the 
prophet tasks his faculties, even uplifted in energy and 
enlightened by the illapse of the Spirit, he is like the 
man who ascends some Alpine peak. As far as his eye 
can reach there stretches out before him a vast scene of 
loveliness. The objects that are comparatively near he 
sees with clearness and accuracy, further off they become 
dim and obscure, till at the very horizon of his vision he 
can descry here a peak and there another and beyond all 
is 'Most in the haze of distance.** Were he to attempt 
to make a chart of the country, by which his vision had 
now been entranced, he would certainly place some peaks 
nearer which were actually further off, would represent 
this as a plain which a closer inspection would reveal to 
be a mountain or plateau ; and he would make a number 
of other similar mistakes, all because his eye was not 
trained or competent to make the correction, to use a 
mathematical phrase, for those distances. A guide how- 
ever accustomed to long and perplexing views, or fa- 
miliar with the country would enable him to rectify his 
errors in placing the different constituents of the scene 
upon his map. 

Suppose we apply this to our Lord*s predictions in 
the twenty-fourth chapter of St. Matthew. It is there 



The Nature of Inspiration 251 

admitted by all scholars that He has before His mind 
two very different and widely separated events, the 
destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the world. To 
His infinite vision there is no confusion of the two. But 
what man has so far been able to discern the '* perspec- 
tive of prophecy" here? 

Take another instance.^ '^ David was anointed, and 
therefore predicted, as king long before he ascended 
the throne. By a series of events, following in the 
ordinary course of providence, without any miracle 
interposed, this prediction was brought to pass. 
. . . No other single narrative of scripture is so 
prolix and circuitous as that which describes the accom- 
plishment of this particular prediction. The sequel of 
the things described is protracted, often retrograde in 
the expectation, and apparently receding from the event ; 
and it fills many chapters before it is brought to a close. 
Upon which I would observe,'* continues Mr. Davison, 
'^that it offers, and seems to be designed to offer, an ex- 
ample, in the actual development, of the progress of 
prophecy to its completion, whatever may be the mazes 
and flexures through which it has to work its way ; and 
suggests to us, in other cases not so particularly narrated, 
how the divine prescience penetrates through the per- 
plexity of human affairs, and its predictions, without a 
sensible miracle, pass to their near or their remote ful- 
fillment.'* 

In these instances we see how God used the very lim- 
itations of the faculties of man to accomplish His pur- 

1 Lee, Ins. Sc, p. 148. 



252 Religion for the Time 

poses. Had the mind of the prophet been able to grasp 
the details of the scene exhibited to it and to record 
them in their exact relations the will of man would have 
been exerted in some cases to defeat and in some to 
hasten the fulfillment of prophecy. But the mind of the 
prophet being capable only of beholding the picture 
without discriminating the relations of its component 
parts, the prophecy proceeded to its accomplishment 
while the free-will of man unconsciously wrought its part. 
When the prophecy was fulfilled it then became con- 
spicuously clear that every feature of the event had been 
accurately foretold. 

Another fact, very prominent in scripture, seems to 
display in very strong colors the view of inspiration we 
are attempting to depict. I refer to the cases where the 
will of the prophet was arrayed in opposition to that of 
God. Balaam, for instance, was at heart in sympathy 
with Moab and wished her triumph. But he frankly tells 
Balak that the nature of the impulse under which he 
acted was of such a character as dominated his own will 
and made it necessary that he should speak only the 
word that God put into his mouth.^ Jonah is another 
instance. His disobedience became the occasion of the 
record of the type of our Lord's resurrection. Jeremiah 
also tells us that at one period of his ministry he became 
so worn out with the opposition and raillery of Israel that 
he concluded to renounce it. ^^Thus said I,'* are his 
words, ''I will not make mention of Him, nor speak any 
more in His name. But His word was in my heart as a 

iNum. 22: 18, 38; 24: 13. 



The Nature of Inspiration 253 

burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with 
forbearing, and I could not stay^ ^ 

This same prophet mentions another fact which shows 
the controlling agency of God in inspiration. *^ More- 
over the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Jere- 
miah, what seest thou ? And I said I see a rod of an 
almond-tree. Then said the Lord unto me thou hast 
well seen: for I will hasten my word to perform it. " ^ 
The significance of the symbol of course arose from the 
fact that the almond was the first of all the trees to sprout 
in the spring and so to proclaim the approach of summer. 
But why, on a particular occasion, should the vision of 
Jeremiah, whether objective or subjective we are not told, 
be fixed upon this particular tree rather than another ? 
The answer is that God so determined in order to assure 
the prophet that the events which he was about to foretell 
would occur in the immediate rather than in the remote 
future. 

Of course that particular phase of prophecy which in- 
contestably proves the supernatural in it is expressed by 
St. John in the text — *'The testimony of Jesus is the 
spirit of prophecy.*' From the time of the fall till the 
close of the Old Testament canon '^God at sundry times 
and in divers manners*' caused His servants to herald 
the coming of Messiah, and that with increasing clear- 
ness as the time approached. It has been well said that 
a life of Christ could be written by simply collating and 
arranging the different passages of the Old Testament 
which speak of Him. We must remember that these 

ijer. 20:9 2jer. i: ii, 12. 



254 Religion for the Time 

books cover in their composition a period of a thousand 
years. They had many authors — how many the critics 
will not permit us at this time to say. And yet they all 
speak of Christ, and each one adds something, a phase 
of character, a glimpse of His work ; so that the New 
Testament has little to add to the portraiture, except to 
say that He has come and has fulfilled all that the 
prophets did say should come to pass. Here is some- 
thing that is absolutely unique in literature. It has one 
explanation, and one only. It is that God and not man 
is the author. 

There are those, however, who will accuse us of mak- 
ing claims for inspiration which the Bible itself distinctly 
repudiates. Of course if this can be shown our view, on 
the premises that we ourselves have laid, falls in hopeless 
collapse. We shall seek therefore to defend ourselves at 
two points where the attack is made with most plausibility, 
and, we think also, with most power. The first shall be 
the statements of St. Paul in i Cor. 7 ; and the second 
the quotations from the Old Testament of both the 
Hebrew and the Seventy in the New. 

The verses in the seventh chapter of i Cor. which are 
supposed to be fatal to the Catholic doctrine of inspira- 
tion are the twelfth and the twenty-fifth. They say— ^ ^ But 
to the rest speak I not the Lord,'* and '' now concerning 
virgins, I have no commandment of the Lord : yet I give my 
judgment as one that hath obtained mercy of the Lord to 
be faithful.'' How often have we heard men, and some- 
times those who ought to have known better, allege that 
the apostle here discriminates between truths which he 



The Nature of Inspiration 255 

uttered by inspiration and those in which he simply pro- 
nounced his individual opinion. You will not fail to 
observe in the first place that this is an egregious example 
of the fallacy known to logicians as ignoratio elenchi the 
capacity to perpetrate which alone must discredit the 
judgment of the individual in the eyes of all intelligent 
men. It assumes that St. Paul was not inspired in mak- 
ing these statements which is the very point at issue. 
But suppose he was inspired, what then becomes of the 
argument ? Now this is precisely the case which we shall 
proceed to show. 

We go back to the tenth verse. ^' Unto the married / 
command yet not I but the Lord." He then goes on to 
rehearse the statement of our Lord as it is given in St. 
Mark's gospel. Observe here that he places his own 
command on precisely the same plane of authority as 
that of Christ. Hov/ever after the Church had made 
numerous converts from heathenism it would often happen 
that a Christian woman would have an unbelieving hus- 
band and vice versa. Besides that there was something 
in the peculiar distress of the time which made celibacy 
specially desirable. For these two emergencies the 
apostle says that our Lord had left no commandment 
that was applicable j but had determined that the Holy 
Spirit operating through the Church should guide it into 
the truth which was relative to them. And that judg- 
ment of the Spirit now proceeds from the aposde's lips. 
This is made very clear in the last verse of the chapter 
where St. Paul says — '^ after my judgment ; and I think 
(consider) also that I have the Spirit of God." The 



256 Religion for the Time 

subject of inspiration must generally have known when 
he was inspired. And St. Paul, contrary to his usual 
custom, tells us that on this particular occasion he was. 
It would seem, therefore, that the objections to inspiration 
drawn from i Cor. 7, rest upon bad logic and a super- 
ficial reading of the text. 

It is well known that the text of Holy Scripture which 
was used in Palestine in the days of our Lord was the Sep- 
tuagint version. There are four principal classes of quo- 
tations from the Old Testament — they are noticed by Dr. 
Lee — which have been explained in modern times on the 
principle that the New Testament writers quoted from 
memory, and on that account inexactly. The inference 
of this school of writers is that here we have the evidence 
of human imperfection which is fatal to the doctrine of 
inspiration we are endeavoring to maintain. 

The cases are numerous, as we should antecedently 
expect, in which the New Testament author quotes the 
Seventy where it differs from the Hebrew. The explana- 
tion here is that the original statement had a breadth and 
fullness of meaning which the Hebrew text did not ex- 
haust, which the Seventy expressed ; and in proof of which 
we have the inspired statement of the New Testament writer, 
who frequently gives the language of our Lord Himself. 

Another class of quotations forsakes the language of 
the Seventy for the reason that it does not accurately rep- 
resent the Hebrew, and appears in a new translation. 
For example, St. John quotes the prediction ^^they shall 
look on Him whom they pierced," which presents a literal 
version of the Hebrew of Zechariah, with the slight, but 



The Nature of Inspiration 257 

as St. John quotes, necessary change of Him for Me, 
These words the Seventy had translated, ^^They shall 
look upon Me because they have mocked Me." ^ In a 
third class the quotation differs from both the Seventy 
and the Hebrew. An instance of this is St. Paul's quo- 
tation of Psalm (iZ\ 18, '* Wherefore he saith, when 
He ascended up on high He led captivity captive and 
gave gifts unto men." The Psalm itself, both original 
and translation, says, '^Thou hast received gifts for 
men." Dr. Lee remarks upon this, '* Christ, by His 
ascension, has redeemed the captive human race, and 
has thereby taken to Himself (as the Psalmist had 
directly stated the matter) gifts among men. Now it is 
implied in the mere statement of this fact, that they, 
whom God thus chooses for Himself must, as such, have 
been furnished with the necessary qualifications : and this 
is the aspect of the question which St. Paul desires to render 
prominent. . . . That God should ''take" to Him- 
self, He must first, from the very nature of the case, 
''give certain graces to man." * 

Another light in which we may see that the apostle 
correctly represents the Psalm which occurs to the writer 
is this. Christ, by His mediatorial work, purchased and 
obtained gifts only that He might bestow them on man ; 
so that to say in one place He received^ and in another 
He gave is simply to express the same thing viewed from 
a different point of sight. 

A fourth phenomenon in this connection is presented 
where one New Testament writer quotes the Hebrew and 

1 Lee, Ins. Sc, 318. 2 Jbid., p. 320. 



258 Religion for the Time 

another citing the same passage adopts the language 
of the Seventy. St. Matthew quotes Isa. 53:4: ** Him- 
self took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses.'* 
''Here he quite abandons the Septuagint, which 
translates : ' He bore our sins and is pained for us ' — 
a sense which would not have been appropriate in the 
passage of the gospel, but which entirely corresponds to 
the purpose of St. Peter, when dilating upon the internal 
maladies of humanity, and the healing of sin. That 
apostle consequently accepts the signification ascribed to 
the original by the Seventy Interpreters, when he quotes, 
as follows, the prophet's words : ' Who His own Self 
bare our sins in His own Body on the tree ... by 
whose stripes ye were healed.' In this case, the seeming 
difference in the explanation of the same passage, by two 
inspired writers, disappears if we remember that physical 
sufferings (and death is to be placed at their head) pre- 
sent one of the aspects under which we are taught in 
scriptures to regard the consequences of sin." ^ 

Geiseler has called our attention to the fact that ''the 
verbal agreement of the evangelists with each other is 
particularly remarkable in many citations from the Old 
Testament in which they follow neither the Hebrew text nor 
the Septuagint with exactness." £. g,, St. Matt. 11:10; 
St. Luke 7 : 27 ; St. Mark i : 2 agree verbatim as 
follows: "This is He of whom it is written, Idoo eyo) 

aizoffTeXkco rov ayyeXov [lOO npo Trpoffajnou (Too 09 
karaaKevaffet rvjv odov (Tou eixnpoadev (Too, while the 

Seventy which in all points corresponds with the 

■1' 

1 Lee, Ins. Sc, 321-2. 

■ r' 



The Nature of Inspiration 259 

Hebrew thus renders the words of Malachi 3:1: Idoo 

£^ aTLOffreXXo) rov ayyeXov fioo kai eizt^Xecperai odov npo 

TzpoaioTzoo pLoo.^^ ^ Their agreement to differ seems to be 
fatal to the idea of their quoting from memory or loosely ; 
but sustains the view that what they wrote was determined 
by the superintendence of the ever-blessed Spirit of God. 

It is said, however, that scripture offers on the face of 
it difiSculties which are insuperable on the hypothesis 
that it is throughout the work of God's Spirit, and there- 
fore it must be abandoned. We cannot but feel that the 
difficulties are incident to our condition and the limita- 
tions of our knowledge; and not to any imperfection 
in the Word of God. Let us take a simple illustration 
from the gospels. According to St. Matthew it was 
another maid ; according to St. Mark a maid ; and a 
man according to St. Luke whose questioning led St. 
Peter, on the second occasion to deny his Master. St. 
John by means of a single expression reconciles at once 
what might have appeared a contradiction in these state- 
ments. He tells us — and we are to remember that he 
was an eye-witness of what passed — that, at this moment 
several persons together interrogated the apostle ; his 
description of the circumstance is, ^' They said therefore 
unto him.'* 

Again in the last half century certain gentlemen have 
been much exercised to learn the day of the crucifixion. 
By an elaborate and careful induction of all the facts at 
command now one and now another has satisfied him- 
self that our Lord suffered on a Thursday, or a Saturday 

1 Lee, Ins. Sc, 324 and note 2. 



26o Religion for the Time 

or even on a Wednesday. A patient investigation of all 
these views has convinced many a man that with the 
light before us it is not possible for us to say on what day 
Christ died. And yet the Catholic Church has nevet 
doubted, but uniformly taught that it was on the Friday 
to which she has with gratitude and love attached the 
epithet Good. Now for the first quarter of the fourth 
century and finally at the Council of Nice all of the 
facts and phenomena, so puzzling to the nineteenth 
century student, must have been before the mind of the 
Church in the Quartodeciman controversy. And yet no 
writer of the time tells us that they occasioned him the 
slightest difficulty. What is the rational inference? 
They had knowledge which reconciled the apparent dis- 
crepancies, but which is at present lost to us. If we had 
it it would afford us the clue which would enable us to 
tread the mazes of the labyrinth in which so many, 
especially of our German friends, have become hope- 
lessly involved. 

This illustrates a principle which if we had the 
humility to apply somewhat widely would, I venture to 
suggest, enable us to see that the cause of many diffi- 
culties existed in ourselves and not in God's Holy 

Word ! 

But we desire to admit frankly that there is a class of 
objections to Holy Scripture which cannot be met in 
this way. I refer to what are called moral difficulties. 
How are these to be removed? I think the answer is by 
a sound philosophy. The command to extirpate the 
nations of Canaan has been alluded to. How can that 



The Nature of Inspiration 261 

be reconciled with the Divine perfections ? We cannot 
go into the question at length. The enquirer will find it 
ably discussed by Canon Mozley in his lectures on the 
Old Testament. The resolution, however, of the prob- 
lem depends upon those same principles which led Al- 
mighty God to impart His will and truth to man '^at 
sundry times and in divers manners'*; in other words 
by means of a revelation which was progressive and not 
instantaneous. 

It is evident that the instruction given to an individual 
or a race must be related to their faculties and the degree 
of development at which they have arrived. We well 
know the throes through which one must pass in order 
to teach a boy arithmetic. But suppose some one should 
have the temerity to attempt to teach him algebra, before 
the foundation of his mathematical education had been 
laid in the principles of arithmetic ? We venture to pre- 
dict that the most heroic efforts, even including a liberal 
use of the cane, would result in total failure. And yet 
this is precisely what a certain class of thinkers seem to 
exact of God. God had a definite work to perform; 
namely the education of the human race. Man's mind 
and moral perceptions were in a certain state. For in- 
stance, at that early period the individual was regarded 
as a mere appendage of the family or the state. His 
rights as a person were not even contemplated. They 
were unknown, and therefore could not be respected. 
With this principle governing the universal mind of the 
time, if an individual was guilty of an offense the pun- 
ishment was inflicted not only on him but on his whole 



262 Religion for the Time 

family which was regarded as part of him. Now God 
designs to teach these people not merely the rights of 
man as man, but also those loftiest principles of morality 
which issued from the lips of Christ. But He begins, 
exactly as Christ proceeded, by teaching them truth as 
they were able to bear it. Now it is not enough for God 
at the outset to simply sanction the execution of the 
principle of justice under the crude and excessive form 
in which it lay in the human mind of that day. His 
purpose is to make those men His servants. They must 
therefore feel that they are obeying His will ; and so the 
act must receive the divine command. In obeying the 
command they are acting under the influence of one of 
the noblest sentiments which reflects the image of God in 
man — the sentiment of justice. According to the light 
we have they are hurried by it into a measure and de- 
tails of cruelty which are revolting and horrible. But it 
was not so to them. Everything which they did was en- 
tirely consonant with their moral perceptions in their 
purest exercise. Any other command would have been 
unintelligible and disobeyed. But God taking advantage 
of the highest moral instinct they possessed, and com- 
manding the highest moral acts of which they were 
capable made that the basis on which He enabled them 
to climb higher, and ever higher still, till at last He had 
so elevated a few, and we must remember that it was 
only a very few, of the Jewish race that they were able to 
listen to and to understand the Sermon on the Mount. 
If any man is disposed to carp at the method by which 
God has succeeded in this surpassingly sublime work let 



The Nature of Inspiration 263 

him first reflect upon the enormous difficulty of the un- 
dertaking as evidenced by the small amount of real 
morality in the world even yet ; and also whether he could 
teach a boy quadratic equations who had not yet learned 
to add. I think he will then feel that God had a de- 
plorable material to work upon in the desperately wicked 
heart of man ; and will be inclined to adore, not traduce, 
the infinite wisdom which was able to melt and mould 
it; and the infinite love and condescension which was 
willing patiently to bear with it through all the centuries 
till He made it His own. 

I do not for one moment pretend that we can explain 
or remove all difficulties which confront us in Holy 
Scripture. It is a revelation of the infinite and from the 
nature of the case has depths and long reaches of expanse 
which we can neither fathom nor explore. But let us 
remember that the greatest difficulties after all we shall 
not get rid of by adopting a lax view of inspiration or 
rejecting large portions of scripture. They are in phi- 
losophy before they appear in Christianity, and are the 
simple and yet ineradicable witnesses to the limitations 
of the knowledge of man. 



ESSAY IV 

CATHOLIC DOGMA AND MODERN EXEGESIS 

Our English word dogma has its root in the Greek 
dou^Wy to appear. It thence has the meaning to decide, 
to determine. The noun doyfia expresses the result of 
the consideration of the facts which present themselves 
upon inquiry, the determination reached by a competent 
tribunal sitting in judgment upon them. No other 
word so apposite to the expression of the truths of a re- 
ligion like ours, which is ethical throughout, could be 
found ; for you perceive it embodies in its root the idea 
that the truths to which it gives validity are those which 
appear, upon the weighing of all the evidence, and are 
set forth by the authority which is appropriate to them. 
It seems to recognize the fact that its utterances have 
no demonstrative force compelling this or that individual 
to accept them, but only if he will regard them, as of right 
he should, they will appear to him as irreformable truth. 

Dogmas receive the epithet Catholic in two senses, the 

one looser, the other stricter. In the more accurate sense 

we understand by Catholic dogmas those for which 

ecumenical authority can be alleged ; and usually we 

mean to describe those only which have been promulgated 

by the General Councils, as e. g., The Doctrine of the 

Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, the Catholic Church. 

But when we ask ourselves the question why the councils 

264 



Catholic Dogma 265 

ruled on these subjects the answer is immediate ; because 
they had been denied by heretics. This would lead us 
antecedently to expect that there were many points which 
in those early ages had not attracted the malevolence of 
opponents, but upon which the mind of the Church was 
clear — so clear indeed as to render the denial of them in- 
conceivable to her, and for that reason a dogmatic state- 
ment of them altogether superfluous. Upon investiga- 
tion we find this to have been the actual condition. We 
have for example no authoritative statement made by the 
Church of the nature and function of miracles. Why ? 
Because they had existed one thousand six hundred years 
and more before any man calling himself a Christian, 
and therefore meriting even the title of heretic, had the 
audacity to call the supernatural into dispute. It is true 
that some of the heathen writers such as Celsus and 
Porphyry did deny and defame the miracles of both dis- 
pensations. But then the Church thought it quite suffi- 
cient to depute a great doctor here or there, utterly to 
demolish the assailant and his assault, in hope that the 
truth might appear to all right-minded men in the 
heathen faction, and so they should be won to Christ. 
It would, however, be both unfair and untrue to refuse 
miracles a place among Catholic dogmas. We have no 
definition simply because there was no occasion for one. 
And when at the beginning of the Creed the Church has 
placed the most stupendous of all miracles, the taking of 
our humanity into Personal union with the Second Per- 
son of the Holy Trinity ; and at the end of it, the 
hardly less astounding wonder, the rehabitation of our 



266 Religion for the Time 

spirits with those bodies which corruption had made its 
own, it cannot be doubted that her mind upon the sub- 
ject has been made clear. 

On exactly the same footing stands the inspiration of 
the divine scriptures. We have, and we cannot be too 
thankful for it, the statement of the Creed, that the Holy 
Ghost '^ spake by the prophets." Still we have no de- 
finitive statement of the doctrine. Here again it is not 
at all because there was any diversity of judgment in the 
Church on the subject. A very slight acquaintance with 
the early writings is sufficient to assure us that entire 
unanimity prevailed among the ancients with regard to 
the source and authority of the word of God. And if 
we would seek for a word to describe their consentient 
judgment we shall find it in that which is to-day regarded 
as a term of the most contemptuous reproach — Bibliola- 
try,^ even as when the heathen racked their brains to 
find an epithet expressive of the deepest ignominy to 
apply to the followers of Jesus, they hit on that very one 
v/hich it has been the highest pride and the deepest joy 
for them all to bear these nineteen hundred years. 

The purport of what we have now arrived at is this. 
Catholic dogma is intended to describe the whole body 
of the judgments of the Church in matters theological. 
In the strictest sense it applies to the definitions and de- 
crees of the General Councils. But the phrase is also 
properly applied to any tenet that will satisfy the Vincen- 
tian canon. What we wish to ascertain is the mind of 

1 1 need hardly say that the term is used here in the sense em- 
ployed by opponents. 



Catholic Dogma 267 

the Church, and when we have reached a determination 
in this one regard, we have attained a Catholic dogma — 
we have reached a resting-place for the mind, we have 
found a basis for conduct. We have God's truth, and 
that, like Himself, can never change. 

We have necessarily indicated the lines upon which 
exegesis must proceed. The Church is the teacher of 
the world, authorized and instructed for this purpose by 
Christ Himself. She is to teach His truth, and the Bible 
is the infallible depository of His truth. She had it first 
from His own lips ; and then lest it might possibly suffer 
addition or diminution by a mere oral transmission as 
generation after generation gave place to its successor, 
the Holy Spirit empowered men whom He Himself chose 
to cast it in its perfect and permanent form in the sacred 
scriptures. 

The relation of dogma to scripture will be at once ap- 
parent. It is the terse and convenient expression of the 
meaning of scripture on a particular subject ; and it ob- 
tains its authority from the fact that it is the voice of the 
Holy Spirit in the Church interpreting the hard sentences 
which He had caused to be written of old. 

The relation of dogma to exegesis cannot now be mis- 
taken. The Church searches the scriptures in order to 
arrive at dogma ; but when once a definition has been 
reached she has it ever afterwards as a bright light, 
shining on the dark places of scripture, and making them 
clear and plain. When we speak of modern exegesis we 
must discriminate. There are many masters of her- 
meneutics of the last age or two who are as loyal to these 



268 Religion for the Time 

principles, and as faithful in their application of them, 
as were Athanasius, Cyril, Augustine or Gregory. The 
mind of the Church has grown in clearness and compre- 
hensiveness in her grasp of truth as from the promise of 
Christ we should expect. And since we shall be obliged 
to find very serious fault with many of the methods and 
results of modern exegesis, we desire in a few words to 
express our deep appreciation of it, and to acknowledge 
the profound obligations which we feel in consequence of 
its substantial and permanent services in the elucidation 
of many difficulties of interpretation. 

It is perhaps, therefore, well that we introduce at this 
point what we wish to say on the bearing of the exegesis 
of recent times on the inspiration of the Sacred Canon. 
I have said that we have no definition on this subject. 
But we are fully justified by the Church of God, Jewish 
and Christian, in asserting that it is throughout the result 
of an especial operation of God the Holy Ghost, distinct 
from any and all other influences upon the souls of men. 
It is sui genuis, and without a parallel in the world of 
letters and of thought. 

It is hardly necessary for me to state that there is much 
which passes to-day under the name of commentary 
which proceeds upon a principle which is different, if not 
radically different, from this. It is true that much of 
that which is most unfortunate in modern exegesis, is the 
result of the full and clear consideration which the 
human element in scripture is receiving. When at the 
Reformation the Protestant sects renounced the authority 
of the Church, they quickly found it necessary to cast 



Catholic Dogma 269 

about for some other foundation on which to repose. 
And they thought they found it in the infallible scriptures. 
So extravagant did they become in their statements in 
regard to the Word of God that they were unwilling to 
admit that men had any other office in its composition, 
than simply to hold the pen, which the Holy Ghost 
moved, and with which He formed the very characters 
which constitute the sacred page. It is of course evident to 
the most cursory reader that the individuality of the human 
author, the circumstances of his life, the precise type and 
degree of his culture are as distinctly marked in Holy 
Scripture as they are in Shakespeare or St. Leo. This 
position, therefore, had to be abandoned. But it is not 
much to be wondered at if men, who had not the Church 
to guide them, went far in the other extreme and implied 
if they did not assert that Holy Scripture had no other 
inspiration than any other work of genius. It stood at 
the very head of the lyrical and ethical literature of our 
race, but was wholly the production of man, and as such 
to be regarded and studied. 

We are sorry to see the denial of inspiration affecting 
men who do not adopt it themselves. Thus for example 
it is hard to see from the books either of Dean Bradley or 
Professor Momerie what purpose they could have 
thought the Holy Ghost had in view in the inspiration of 
Ecclesiastes. I think a careful perusal will convince any 
one that their judgment is that there was none at all 
worth speaking of. But sorry as we must be at these and 
a thousand other still worse results, we cannot but rejoice 
at the immense good the Church has reaped. It is 



270 Religion for the Time 

probably not too much to say that what we designate as 
the human element in scripture, (by which we intend to 
describe the character, education and personality of the 
writer — his age, his surroundings, everything that gives 
color, and in turn throws light upon his work) was never 
so well understood as now. Never before was such a series 
of books as that known as ^* Men of the Bible *' possible. 
Not until this age could such a piece of exegesis have 
appeared as Westcott's St. John. We can bring light 
from an hundred sources to-day to elucidate difficulties 
of Holy Writ which were closed to us a century ago. A de- 
fense for Christianity can be made to-day so crushing that 
no adversary can stand against it. And nearly all this 
addition to the evidential armament is the result of the 
investigation of the human element in scripture. Its 
animus has been often, perhaps generally hostile ; but its 
fruits have invariably succored the forces of truth. 
Sometimes in Germany, sometimes in England and even 
in America one considering himself a foe has delved into 
ancient manuscripts of history or philology, has pored 
over the hieroglyphics of monuments and mausoleums, 
of tablets and cylinders of clay and stone; but when 
their meaning has been at last deciphered it has con- 
tributed always to confirm and sometimes to supplement 
the statements of the Word of God. The would-be enemy 
has been found fighting in the ranks of the hosts of God. 
I have said that the dogmas of the Church condition 
all interpretation of Holy Scripture. When once they 
are disseminated they become touch-stones, not only of a 
man's loyalty to truth, but of his possession of the mind 



Catholic Dogma 271 

of the Spirit in his unfolding of the Word of God. We 
have seen that they are of such a character as to satisfy but 
not to coerce the understanding. A man therefore declares 
himself a Catholic or an heretic according as he accepts 
them, or chooses something else in preference to them. 
It has often been attempted in modern times to justify 
the latter procedure by alleging the Word of God in op- 
position to Catholic dogma. This of course can never 
be actually done ; but we should like to bring under 
review two instances in which it is in some quarters sup- 
posed to have been achieved with great success, in the 
hope (it probably is a vain one), of dissuading ad- 
venturous souls from a similar undertaking in days to 
come. 

We have defended the claim of the Catholic doctrine 
of the incarnation to a place among irreformable dogmas. 
There can be no possible mistake as to what it is, for it 
stands in the Creed, ^'The only-begotten Son of God, 
being of one substance with the Father, for us men and for 
our salvation come down for heaven, and was incarnate 
by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made 



man.** 



The primary impulse to the denial of this it is true 
has not come from exegesis, but from philosophy. It 
comes within our scope however as having sought justifi- 
cation from the language of scripture. There has been 
in Germany throughout this century a feeling of dis- 
satisfaction with the Chalcedonian Christology and a 
disposition to revise it. It has been said over and over 
again that the Christ of scripture has an human intelli- 



Tji Religion for the Time 

gence, an human will and an human existence objective 
to that of all other beings. But these three, intelligence, 
separate existence and will are the criteria of personality. 
They are the marks by which we recognize a person. 
Therefore, they would like to conclude, Christ has an 
human as well as a divine Person. And not, at least in 
most cases, going the length of asserting this they en- 
deavor to mediate between this and the Catholic 
view. 

It occurs to me to note the fallacy, formal or material, 
arising out of the ambiguity of the phrase, separate ex- 
istence. If they mean to assert that Christ had an 
human existence objective to His divine Personality any 
Catholic will take issue with them at once and any 
inference they may attempt to draw is vitiated ab initio 
by an atrocious petitio principii. If however they mean 
simply that He had an human nature distinct from all 
other sons of men, no conclusion whatever can be drawn 
in reference to the Personality of Christ and the first 
attempt to deduce one is an outrage against formal logic. 

Having seen that the philosophical objection to the 
dogma of the incarnation either sublimes in vapor, or 
else resolves itself into the theological difficulty which 
unquestionably attends the mystery, we are compelled to 
face the doctrine in its own proper sphere. The great 
book, indeed the only great book as far as we know 
which has been written from the standpoint we are 
criticising is Dorner's Person of Christ. Let us confine 
ourselves to his remarks on St. Cyril. The chapter is 
most elaborate. He criticises the Catholic doctrine as 



Catholic Dogma 273 

set forth by the saint, and especially the illustration of 
the fire and the steel, with what appears to us a singular 
want of appreciation. He concludes with the definite 
statement that St. Cyril never arrived at an incarnation. 
But what does he mean by this ? Simply that St. Cyril 
does not recognize an human person in our Lord. This 
is entirely true. From first to last he affirms that Christ 
took our humanity into union with Himself — that ^^the 
Word was made flesh and came and tabernacled in our 
nature.*' 

It will hardly be wondered at that Dr. Dorner does 
not particularly relish St. Cyril's writings when we hear 
the saint animadverting in a way, which in these lax 
times, is we think most refreshing, upon the particular 
form of heresy of which he is the last and most dis- 
tinguished exponent. **Fie! the folly and distraught 
mind of them who imagine somehow that these things 
are so ; for it is unbelief and naught else, and the 
novelty of impious inventions and the subversion of the 
divine and sacred preachings which have proclaimed our 
Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Word that is out 
of God the Father made man and incarnate, so that the 
same is God ahke and man.'* . 

He then proceeds to show that this doctrine is opposed 
alike to the sacred scriptures and Catholic tradition that 
it denies the incarnation, and renders void the whole 
work of the Son of God for our salvation. I must 
limit myself to two passages. <* If now as our opponents 
say and choose to hold, the only-begotten Word of God 
taking a man of the seed of the divine David and of 



274 Religion for the Time 

Abraham prepared him to be fashioned in the Holy 
Virgin and connected this man with Himself and hath 
made Him to come into experience of death and raising 
Him from the dead took Him up into heaven and seated 
Him on the right hand of God ; superfluously (as it 
seems) is He said both by the holy Fathers and by our- 
selves and by the whole God-inspired scripture to be 
made man (for this I deem and naught else did the all- 
wise John signifiy when he wrote, the Word was made 
flesh) and the mystery of the economy with flesh has 
been (it is like) turned right round to the exact opposite. 
For one cannot see that the Word being by nature God, 
and beaming forth from God, abased Himself to empti- 
ness, taking bondmen's form and hath humbled Himself, 
but on the contrary, man was brought up into the glory 
of the Godhead and the excellency that is over all, and 
took God's form and was rather exalted, co-throned with 
the Father/* 

*' If it be true as they say, and the only-begotten dis- 
dained the economy, what shame did He despise? Now 
hath He become obedient to the Father unto death yea 
the death of the cross ? and if taking a man He led him 
both to the experience of death, and bringing him into 
heaven too, showed him co-throned with the Father; 
where now at last will His own throne be seen, if they 
say not two sons, but one who co-sitteth, him, that is, 
who is of the seed of David and Abraham ? How will 
He too be said to be the Saviour of the world and not 
rather patron or bringer-forward of a man through 
wiiom we have been also saved, and a man other 



Catholic Dogma 275 

than He has become the completion of law and 
prophets ? " ^ 

I am aware that there is much in these passages which 
cannot be alleged against Dorner. They are in fact 
comprehensive and supply the answer to every shade of 
heresy proceeding from this quarter. If God the Son 
took a man into association with Him — there is no possi- 
bility of union — our salvation was wrought by man and 
not God. And further, that man alone could derive the 
benefits of salvation. If, however, Christ took not any 
one man, but the seed of Abraham — one human nature 
in its entirety — then do those further words of the great 
champion of the incarnation illumine with hope and ir- 
radiate with joy the hearts of all mankind. *'The Son 
came (as I said) or was made man, transelementing our 
estate as in Himself first unto a holy and admirable and 
truly marvellous birth and life : and Himself first be- 
came born of the Holy Ghost, I mean as to the flesh, in 
order that the grace passing through as by a path unto 
ourselves too, we having not from blood nor from the 
will of the flesh nor from the will of man but from God 
through the Spirit our soul's new birth and spiritual con- 
formation unto the Son who is by nature and truly, 
might call God Father and might thus abide un decay- 
ing, as possessing no longer the first father, Adam, in 
whom we decayed " ^ 

As another effort, and this directly in the field of 
exegesis, to revolt from Catholic dogma may be men- 
tioned Meyer's interpretation of the Logos in the open- 

1 Christ is One, Oxford tr. pp. 255-7. ^ Ibid., 249-50. 



276 Religion for the Time 

ing of St. John's gospel. After a protracted consider- 
ation of the subject he tells us : '^According to John, 
by h)/o?, which is throughout viewed by him (as is clear 
from the entire prologue down to verse eighteen), under the 
conception of a personal subsistence, we must understand 
nothing else than the self-revelatio7i of the divine 
essence, before all time immanent in God, but for 
the acco7nplishment of the act of creation proceeding 
hypostatically from Him and ever after operating in the 
spirit world as a creatiftg, qicickening aiid illuminating 
personal principle, equal to God Himself in nature and 
glory ; which divine self-revelation appeared bodily in 
the man Jesus and accomplished the work of the salva- 
tion of the world. * * 

At this every Catholic must demur. It was not ''for 
the accomplishment of the act of creation that the 
Second Person of the Holy Trinity proceeded hypostatic- 
ally from God. The Word was not immanent in God 
up to the time of creation, and transient from Him after 
that ; but was from all eternity both immanent and 
transient v/ith reference to the Father not at all on ac- 
count of the work of creation but in virtue of the ne- 
cessity of the Being and Nature of God. Creation pro- 
duced no change at all in the relations of the Persons of 
the ever-blessed Godhead. But God did exist by the 
principle of His inner life in the form of the Three Sub- 
sistences — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. 
Meyer's minute attention to the letter of scripture has 
betrayed him, not exactly into Sabellianism but some- 
thing which is dangerously akin to it. 



Catholic Dogma 277 

The methods of that part of modern exegesis which 
concern the supernatural are most peculiar. The in- 
terpreter has first fully satisfied himself that miracles 
have not, could not have, occurred. He takes up the 
Bible and finds it teeming with accounts of them, never- 
theless. He has many devices by which to emancipate 
himself from the necessity of accepting them. One is 
to note the all-important circumstance that Aeph has 8a 
where the Vatican manuscript has yap, C. D. and E. 
have no particle at all. Therefore the whole paragraph 
is spurious. When there are such irreconcilable dis- 
crepancies in the text the evidence of corruption is com- 
plete, and a doctrinal bias in favor of miracles in the 
mind of the copyist has been established ; and no man 
acquainted with the procedure and grand results of the 
higher criticism could be expected to give credence to 
any part of the passage. It is an evidence of the igno- 
rance and bigotry of Catholics that they do not at once 
expunge it from their Bibles. 

Another favorite device of the enemies of the super- 
natural is to discover beyond all controversy that the 
books which contain the record of the miracles were not 
written by the men whose names they bear, but were 
the product of a much later day, and from another pen. 
In the interval which elapsed — and it is always some- 
what long — there was opportunity for such change in the 
narrative as to make it altogether unrecognizable. In a 
superstitious and uncritical age the supernatural elements 
were added. But they were altogether foreign to the 
original event as it really happened. 



278 Religion for the Time 

There is another class of exegetics who accept the 
supernatural, but reserve for themselves the privilege of 
being eclectic in the manifestations of it, in sacred writ, 
to which they are willing to give their approval. As an 
instance of this I adduce, what I cannot but consider the 
great blot upon Canon Farrar's Life of Christ, /. ^., if 
we overlook his beginning with the Nativity. I speak of 
his remarks on the healing of the Demoniac at Gadara. 
St. Mark tells us — ^* There was there nigh unto the 
mountains a great herd of swine feeding. And all the 
devils besought Him, saying. Send us into the swine that 
we may enter into them. And forthwith Jesus gave them 
leave. And the unclean spirits went out and entered 
into the swine : and the herd ran violently down a steep 
place into the sea (they were about 2,000) and were 
choked in the sea.*' Here is Farrar's comment. "It 
is true that the evangelists (as their language clearly 
shows) held, in all its simplicity, the belief that the 
actual devils passed in multitudes out of the man and 
into the swine. But is it not allowable here to make a 
distinction between actual facts and that which was the 
mere conjecture and inference of the spectators from 
whom the three evangelists heard the tale? If we are 
not bound to believe the man's hallucination that six 
thousand devils were in possession of his soul, are we 
bound to believe the possibility suggested by his per- 
turbed intellect, that the unclean spirits should pass 
from him into the swine." ^ His real opinion is that 
the swine were so frightened by the sight of the hor- 

* I> PP- 33S-9- 



Catholic Dogma 279 

rible convulsions, and the flow of blood which accom- 
panied the exorcism that they rushed in terror, not heed- 
ing where they went, till the waters of the lake closed 
upon them, and became their tomb. And when he 
quotes Neander and Pressense to the effect that the spirits 
could not have entered into the swine, he seems to con- 
sider that the matter has been finally adjudicated. 

There seems to be little remark necessary. We have 
spoken favorably of the prominence which has been given 
to the human element in scripture. But we certainly 
did not intend to countenance the opinion that the 
evangelists could record a tale which had no further 
foundation than the mistake of an ignorant and excited 
mob. It would be contrary to our judgment of the part 
that the divine element plays in scripture to believe that 
the precipitation and death of these swine were due to any- 
thing else than, what scripture says they were, the ingress 
of the demons. It is not to the supernatural in general that 
Farrar objects. But because the sacrifice of these ani- 
mals seems inconsistent to many with the divine clem- 
ency. But a Catholic would prefer to admit that the 
explanation of this is beyond his present light, rather 
than accuse Holy Scripture of inaccuracy, much less 
error. 

It seems to us that on this whole question of miracles 
there is but one inquiry to be made — Do you believe in 
God? It is incomprehensible that any man who enter- 
tains the conception of an omnipotent, omniscient, om- 
nipresent Creator and Sovereign of the universe should 
find any difficulty in this or that manifestation of His 



28o Religion for the Time 

power and will. The scientist tells us that all goes on 
in this world according to processes which are uniform 
and fixed. Blessed be God that it is so ! It is hard to 
see how life would be tolerable or even possible, other- 
wise. But does this prevent God from departing from 
His usual and orderly mode of procedure ? Not if He 
has wilL If He is free to exert His limitless power there 
is nothing to trammel His action except the limits which 
His own holy nature impose. And to say that He who 
by His will has caused men to be safe from being hurled 
helplessly into space by the centrifugal force of the rota- 
tion of the earth by a stronger one attracting them to the 
centre, could not exert another force which would enable 
Him in human form to walk upon water without being 
drawn to its depths, seems nothing short of ridiculous. 
It is far more absurd than to say that a man who every 
morning for thirty years has turned to the right at a 
certain corner does not possess the power to turn to the 
left, if, for some good reason he wishes to to-morrow. 
The difficulty which men now experience in regard to the 
supernatural results from the fact that they have forgotten 
what kind of a Being God is. When once they realize 
that He has done and ever does whatsoever has pleased 
Him in heaven and earth, the obstacles which now ob- 
struct their vision will prove like the mists of the morning 
which flee away before the light and heat of the rising 
sun. 

We have two thoughts in conclusion. The first is that 
Catholic dogma, as we saw its etymology to justify, is 
and is intended to be a touch-stone of character. A man 



Catholic Dogma 281 

shows his fidelity to God quite as much in humbly ac- 
cepting truth, as he does in meekly submitting to the 
enactments of the moral law. Now this is what is for- 
gotten or denied by what we distinguish as modern 
exegesis by its very repudiation of this principle. Private 
judgment it places as a king supreme over the whole 
realm of truth. The interpreter is to use all aids at 
hand, but in the determination of the meaning of a 
passage the final court of appeal is his own mind. It is 
no matter that he has arrived at a position which is op- 
posed to that held to be the meaning of the text by all 
who went before him, or even that it is subversive of 
some fundamental truth of Christianity. He is, by the 
theory in question, not only entitled, but obliged to 
adhere to his conviction and to act upon it. Passing 
over much which ought to be criticised in this, I confine 
myself to the consideration of only one of its aspects. I 
wish to point out that it is essentially rationalistic. By 
rationalism I understand that philosophical position 
which insists that that is truth and that only is truth, 
which is comprehensible by the human mind ; and in 
practice it has always meant that that was truth which 
appeared so to the individual thinking, and nothing else 
should be considered so to be. In saying this I have 
simply uttered what the advocates of private judgment 
have sounded upon the house-tops for three centuries and 
a half. Each man has felt obliged to read the Bible as 
if every part and the whole of it was a mirror in which 
the reflections of his mind were to be seen. It has oc- 
curred to few of them even to think that tliere might be 



282 Religion for the Time 

truths and mysteries in Holy Scripture too high and too 
deep for their limited range of mental vision. Some of 
them have indeed recognized this, but it has always been 
on topics and in emergencies where their purpose was 
thus best suited. The world has yet to produce one 
who was not at bottom a rationalist, /. ^., one who insists 
upon crowding the sacred scriptures into the mould in 
which his own mind has fashioned truth. The logic of 
this process I need only point out. It teaches that every 
thing is truth, and that there is no such thing as truth. 
There is no standard by which we can compare our 
judgments, and test their conformity. Whatever appears 
to me to be true, for me is true, and that is the clearest 
light to which we have access. 

My second thought is that the correction of this deplora- 
ble chaos of opinion is found in Catholic dogma. Here we 
have the standard authenticated by Jesus Christ Himself. 
We know what truth is. And when one or another 
product of the human mind is submitted for examination 
may determine its verity or falsity by viewing it in the 
light of dogma. This is not, as is often alleged, to fetter 
the human mind and exclude originality. It simply in- 
dicates the direction in which alone one may look for 
fruitful effort. It facilitates enquiry and is the condition 
of attaining truth. Do not imagine that there is any- 
thing in this peculiar to theology. The limitation of 
proceeding from a definitely fixed position attaches to 
every department of human investigation. Thus mathe- 
matics must start with its axioms, metaphysics and 
ethics with their first or fundamental truths. If a man 



Catholic Dogma 283 

does not admit them all progress in one of those sciences 
is to him forever impossible. Catholic dogmas are the 
first truths of theology. If a man rejects them he is an 
heretic, and can never attain knowledge in the science of 
God. St. Paul anticipates the result of his labors — 
''ever learning and never able to come to a knowledge 
of the truth." 



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